Re: gnuplot and DISPLAY

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Allin Cottrell wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> 
>> Allin Cottrell wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> (2) After applying Daniel's patch and recompiling, my "set term
>>> png" echoed to gnuplot produced a failure (as before), but in
>>> addition
>>>
>>>    echo "show version long" | gnuplot
>>>
>>> now produced the same X11 failure!
>>
>>
>> Strange.  What is the strace this time?
> 
> 
> I didn't check that; I can, if it's of interest.  But here's one more 
> piece of information.  I now suspect that this may be a bug in 
> gnome-terminal.  I was running the test in gnome-terminal and it 
> occurred to me to try doing the same thing in an xterm: lo and behold, 
> no problem!  That is, my original test
> 
>  echo "set term png" | gnuplot && echo "OK"
> 
> works fine, over the same 2-stage ssh connection from home to campus, 
> when executed in an xterm.
> 
> All the same, it's bizarre that the problem doesn't occur with older 
> gnuplot versions.

Yes, it is strange.  Apparently xterm is more forgiving, but I think there may still be an issue.  I say that because if I comment out all locations where X11_ipc is assigned inside X11_init(), which should be the equivalent of:

RETURN VALUE
       The popen function returns NULL if the fork(2) or pipe(2)  calls  fail,
       or if it cannot allocate memory.

gnuplot is exiting with a segfault.

In any case, I think that patch I put on SourceForge should be moved into CVS to make the endianess function consistent with other functions.

Dan