Re: Fwd: Gnuplot.app for Mac users Also coordination with Octave

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

On Thursday 12 July 2007 13:04, Thomas Treichl <Tho...@gm...> wrote:
> Dear Ethan,
> 
> I don't know if I sent this email to the right mailing-list that's why I once
> again send this email directly to you as a Gnuplot maintainer... 

Thanks.  I will forward your mail to the developers mailing list.

There are several issues on which the octave and gnuplot projects should
coordinate better. I am neither an Octave nor a Mac user, so I may not
fully understand all the details, but here is how I understand it...

1) I am told that Octave now pipes in-line data to gnuplot, which has
broken the ability to zoom with the mouse and also some or all of the
normal hot-keys.  There are 2 competing proposals for how we could fix
this, but it might help if we knew better what additional changes 
might or might not be possible on the Octave end of the pipe.
And of course it would have been nice to have more advance warning
of this change, so that we might have had a fix all ready to go.

2) I have been relying on several developers with Mac experience to
provide an OSX binary package.  As I understand it, this has been
held up by difficulties with creating a universal binary, and by 
problems with mouse focus.  I honestly do not understand your summary
of Mac issues which you have now solved.  Are these the same?
Or maybe those only had to do with inclusion of the wxt terminal?

3) Aquaterm is somewhat of a separate issue.  Basically it does not
implement the full feature set provided by other gnuplot interactive
terminals. I'm sure this could be fixed, but I don't think anyone is
currently working on it.  I recently borrowed a Mac and a local OSX
fanatic to walk me through use of gnuplot under OSX, and my conclusion
was that use of aquaterm came in a poor second to using the x11 terminal.
So I would hope that your binary supports x11 also?

Anyhow, I think we would be happy to place working Mac binaries on
the SourceForge site.  But I'd like some of the Mac-based developers
to chime in with comments

	Ethan






On Thursday 12 July 2007 13:46, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> Forwarding this from Thomas Treichl <Tho...@gm...>
> 
> Dear Gnuplot maintainers,
> 
> we have created Octave.app for PPC 10.3 and i386 10.4 Mac users that can be 
> downloaded at
> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2888. One of the last 
> things that need to be done for Octave.app is to make a ready-to-run binary 
> release of gnuplot available that can then be taken as the background plotting 
> engine. That's why we quickly have decided to create another Mac application 
> that can be set up as easy as Octave.app but is not bundled with Octave.app and 
> that we call this time: Gnuplot.app.
> 
> We nearly have finished building Gnuplot.app PPC and Gnuplot.app i386 with 
> gnuplot version 4.2 including most features like gdlib, jpg and png (but not 
> wxWindows because of a size-explosion of the *.dmg image and no pdf-support 
> because of a missing GPL-compatiple license). We didn't create a universal 
> binary Gnuplot.app because we don't see a real advantage of universal binaries 
> for Mac (we already have gone through this whole discussion about universal 
> binaries or two binaries of Octave.app at one of the mailing lists at octave.org 
> months ago).
> 
> For building either the PPC version or i386 version of Gnuplot.app we have 
> created a single shell script - it's not very nice but very powerful if we have 
> a look at the Gnuplot.app result that comes out (and there are also some other 
> external files that are needed, eg. a 128x128bit gnuplot.icns file, the 
> .DS_Store file and the corresponding background image...). Some very important 
> Mac-features of Gnuplot.app (like the ones of Octave.app) are:
> 
>   - there is no easier way of installation (drag'n drop somewhere)
>   - and no easier way of deinstallation (drag'n drop into trash)
>   - it's bundled, no other dependency must be installed (AquaTerm inclusion)
>   - gnuplot can also be called from the command line of Terminal.app or xterm
> 
> The inclusion of AquaTerm into Gnuplot.app has taken a while but we were able to 
> set it up very nice ;) The user must not install any AquaTerm.pkg anymore, the 
> necessary AquaTerm.framework is included into Gnuplot.app directly and it is 
> started automatically if the user plots something the first time to the AquaTerm 
> backend. There is one problem left ie. that we are not able to compile AquaTerm 
> "not universal", ie. whatever PPC *or* i386 is set in the projects preferences 
> in this XCode program of the AquaTerm.project it is not taken for compilation. 
> It always creates a universal binary (that's not good because SDK 10.4.9u then 
> must be taken and so we can't create a 10.3 PPC version like we did for 
> Octave.app PPC). The manual of XCode says: change compiler option ARCH and SDK 
> in the preferences dialog and you're done ;( If it would be that easy...
> 
> Maybe my email hits you like a hammer (I don't hope so) but I wanted to get into 
> contact with you in a very early stage because you also might have a thousand 
> questions that need to be answered and I'm also interested in your further 
> requirements for an official release. And I'd also like to address our interests 
> that would be that the PPC and the i386 Gnuplot.app could be hosted on your side 
> of sourceforge.net (because octave.sourceforge.net would not be the right place) 
> and that somebody could continue working on this topic for future releases of a 
> Gnuplot.app that understands much more about gnuplot in general than we do. The 
> problem is that the one or the other might have a special gnuplot-depending 
> question and I don't know if we do have the knowledge and the time to answer 
> specific internals...
> 
> The build scripts need some more clean-up but I think that I'm able to send it 
> in a few days (whom? or where?). I can also prepare a PPC *dmg and a i386 *.dmg 
> for very early alpha-tests (<5MB each *.dmg). Please also reply any comments and 
> questions directly because I'm not a subscriber to any of your lists. I think 
> hosting a Gnuplot.app would also be of your interest as there doesn't exist one 
> at your download site for 4.2 at the moment and so I hope that we can find 
> together soon...
> 
>    Thomas
> 
> 

-- 
Ethan A Merritt            Courier Deliveries: 1959 NE Pacific
Dept of Biochemistry
Health Sciences Building
University of Washington - Seattle WA 98195-7742