Re: Compilation instructions for Windows and Mac OS X

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

On Wednesday 18 June 2008 09:56:05 am Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> 
> Thanks to both of you. I am looking for installation
> and compilation from source, for instance, if somebody
> wants to build the development version.
> 
> Let me try and summarize:
> 
> 1)
> You need either AquaTerm or X11 installed.
> (Gnuplot will compile without them, but the only
> interactive terminal you will be able to use will be
> the dumb terminal. File terminals will work.)
> 
> 1a)
> X11 requires the Apple developers kit as a
> separate install, unless you are running Leopard
> or newer, on which it is already preinstalled.
> 
> 1b)
> AquaTerm can be downloaded as either src
> or precompiled binary from sourceforge.
> 
> 2)
> Once either one of these is installed and is detected
> during the configure-step, the build process is the 
> same as for all other Unix platforms.
> 
> 3)
> Finally, recent versions of OS X ship with a broken
> version of the Gnu libreadline. These problems will
> not be detected during the configure step, but will
> lead to compile-time errors later. There are two
> workarounds:
> - use Gnuplot's own (minimalistic) libreadline:
> 	/configure --with-readline=builtin 
> - or replace Apple's version of readline with the 
> 	version before building.
> 
> 
> Is this correct?

The aquaterm version on http://aquaterm.darwinports.com/
is newer than the one on SourceForge.  I think (not sure) that you
need the newer one if you are using Leopard.

Development of aquaterm seems to have stagnated.
Gnuplot actually supports aquaterm features (e.g. transparency)
that never made it into the aquaterm version on SourceForge.
I have not checked the Darwin port.

Mac fans seem to like aqua, but in terms of gnuplot performance
and features,  the x11 terminal works much better than aquaterm.
If aquaterm development were to resume, that might change.
 
> By the way, it would be cool if precompiled
> binaries for OS X would be available on the
> gnuplot site.

I echo Mojca's concern:  I haven't had much luck with 3rd party
pre-compiled OSX apps.  They tend to require incompatible versions
of various font and graphics libraries.  It's probably possible to tweak
system configurations to work around this, but at least from my
perspective it's easier to build from source and link against whatever
version of the libraries you already have installed.  Nevertheless,
there are pre-compiled gnuplot binaries for both Darwin and Fink if
you want to go that route.  Maybe also in the Octave package?

	Ethan


 
> 
> On Tuesday 17 June 2008 15:05, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 9:51 PM, Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> > > For my book project, I would like to summarize
> > > installation and compilation instructions for
> > > gnuplot.
> > >
> > > I am struggling to get good descriptions together
> > > for Win and OS X, not least because I don't have
> > > access to either platform.
> > >
> > > While the description for Windows seems rather
> > > straightforward, I have not been able to find
> > > installation instructions for Mac OS X.
> >
> > It depends on whether you want gnuplot to run on the first place, or
> > if you want to create a proper package out of it.
> >
> > To make it run at all by building from sources, the instructions are
> > exactly the same as on linux (probably ./prepare, ./configure, make,
> > make install). The only additional thing that needs to be installed in
> > aquaterm (http://sourceforge.net/projects/aquaterm/), but I forgot how
> > I installed it.
> >
> > An alternative straightforward way is to install gnuplot using fink
> > (http://www.finkproject.org/). If one has fink installed, it's
> > possible to say either
> >     fink install gnuplot
> > or
> >     fink install gnuplot-nox
> > which will install gnuplot without support for xterm, but there is
> > aquaterm, which is in a way better (more native), but doesn't support
> > all the functionality - mouse is "dead" (you can resize, but that will
> > only scale, and you cannot zoom into the plot or retreive values from
> > points).
> >
> > Still, I only use aquaterm as a terminal. For using xterm, one needs
> > to install X11 first, at least on Tiger (on the new Leopard, X11 is
> > already installed).
> >
> > To make a package for distributing it (something approximately
> > equivalent to rpm on linux), one needs a more elaborate instructions,
> > but I doubt that people would really want that.
> >
> > Mojca
> 
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