Re: gnuplot, wxWidgets and distributions

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Sunday 24 September 2006 11:48 am, Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
> >> - write a plugin interface to gnuplot, so that the wxWidgets is
> >> dynamically loadable and can be distributed separately
> >
> > That would be the best.
> >  =20
> Technically the best, but arguably not for the user, since he would have=
=20
> to find it in the distribution package manager...

I don't think that by itself is a problem. People are used to downloading
and installing extension plugins for their web browser, video/audio plugins
for their media player, filter plugins for their word processor, etc.
They should be able to handle terminal plugins for gnuplot.

I think the bigger hurdle is portability.  Implementing a plugin system
for linux would be easy.  But we'd have to do it all over again for=20
Solaris, OSF, Irix, Windows, OSX, etc.  Or perhaps there is a=20
multi-platform plugin infrastructure that I am unaware of? =20

We discussed this issue briefly quite a while ago, with regard to patch
#588805  	  external functions via plugins

I like the idea of plugins, but implementation is non-trivial.


However, ...
I can think of one more alternative.  If the wxt terminal code were
broken out into a separate executable, equivalent to gnuplot_x11,=20
then the core gnuplot binary would not need to be linked against
pango/cairo/wxWidgets.   The extreme case of this would be=20
teaching the wxt code to understand the same piped binary stream
format that goes between gnuplot <---> gnuplot_x11.  Then we'd
have a binary pipe API shared by multiple terminal types.
The library dependencies would not pertain to the core gnuplot
binary, only to the parallel helper programs.




=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742