Calling all Atari geezers - Hello, anyone there?

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

We could lighten the gnuplot codebase by 2800+ lines if we drop our
current pretense of atari support.  I am dubious that the current
CVS tree would compile on this platform.

- I can find no evidence on the web that any version of gnuplot
  since 3.7 has been successfully built for atari.

- The most recent serious mention of gnuplot that I can find on an
  atari newsgroup is a 1997 post by Theo Hopman that gnuplot 3.6beta
  could be compiled. (OK, there was a 2006 flamefest on
  fr.comp.sys.atari where references to gnuplot were lobbed like
  hand grenades, but I believe we can ignore that). 

- "Due to declining membership, The Ol' Hackers Atari Users Group
   closed its doors after its final meeting in December 2000"
                                 -  http://www.atariarchives.org/
   Searching for "gnuplot" on this web site turns up essentially
   nothing.

- Emulators for Atari do exist (http://www.cheek.org/atari/emulator.htm)
  but seem only to be used by the "retro gaming" community.

Do any Atari sentimentalists want to champion their cause?



Here is a diffstat for removal of atari-related code from CVS
of several months back:

[2] diffstat remove_ATARI_20oct2007.patch
 NEWS                |    1
 config/README       |    4
 config/makefile.amg |    5
 config/makefile.mto |  238 ---------------
 config/makefile.st  |  158 ----------
 config/makefile.unx |    2
 config/term_pc.h    |   16 -
 configure.in        |    4
 docs/Makefile.in    |    4
 docs/doc2texi.el    |    8
 docs/gnuplot.doc    |   60 ---
 docs/gpcard.tex     |    2
 src/command.c       |   99 ------
 src/corplot.c       |    3
 src/fit.c           |   27 -
 src/gadgets.c       |    7
 src/gnuplot.prj     |   60 ---
 src/gp_types.h      |    2
 src/help.c          |   12
 src/internal.c      |   34 --
 src/makefile.all    |    4
 src/makefile.awc    |    4
 src/plot.c          |   48 ---
 src/plot.h          |    3
 src/readline.c      |  124 --------
 src/readline.h      |    4
 src/show.c          |    9
 src/standard.c      |  211 -------------
 src/syscfg.h        |   33 --
 src/term.c          |   12
 src/term.h          |   16 -
 src/variable.c      |    2
 term/atariaes.trm   |  787 ----------------------------------------------------
 term/atarivdi.trm   |  488 --------------------------------
 term/multitos.trm   |  421 ---------------------------
 35 files changed, 56 insertions(+), 2856 deletions(-)

-- 
Ethan A Merritt