Do we need a -no-init-file option? [was Re: gnuplot-4.2.rc1: tutorial]

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

On Wednesday 04 October 2006 09:48 am, Reiner Steib wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 04 2006, Ethan Merritt wrote:
>
> > Are you sure this isn't being added by some local TeX configuration
> > option on your machine?
>
> I found the culprit: it's "set encoding iso_8859_1" in `~/.gnuplot'.
> Does gnuplot have a "-no-init-file" option?  
> Such an option should be used when generating tutorial/eg*.tex.

We have no such option, but it is an interesting point.

I can see at least two way such an option could work 

1) gnuplot -no-init-file 
   If the command line option is present,
   skip the call to load_rcfile()  on line 563 of plot.c

2) setenv GNUPLOTRC "" ; gnuplot 
   The init file name is hard-coded into the string constant PLOTRC.
   We could provide an environment variable that overrides this.
   Setting it to "" or to any non-existent file name would 
   bypass the default names "~/.gnuplot" or "gnuplot.ini".

Option 2 has the additional advantage that you could use this
mechanism to specify alternative initialization files.

Which would be more portable, and more useful - 
a command line option or an environmental variable?


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA