Re: GPVAL_TERM_VCHAR (was: problem with "set x11 {size WW, HH} {position XX, YY}")

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

On Thursday 12 February 2009 17:31:14 Ben Abbott wrote:
> 
> Ethan Merrit wrote:
> > Right.  No re-positioning or re-sizing of an existing window.
> 
> 
> Personally, I have no position on what is and is not proper with  
> respect to the positioning of windows. However, I think it is  
> important to clarify a point.
> 
> Octave's intention is to allow the user to move/resize the figures via  
> the mouse, the command line, or a script. This intent is primarily  
> driven by the goal of compatibility with Matlab.

Shrug.  It's your project, not mine.  Do as you like.
But IMHO it is a mistake to define your own goal as imitation of the
behaviour of another project, particular a closed-source one.
This is why (IMHO of course) OpenOffice is such a disaster.
The people who care about how well you imitate the other program
*are already using the other program*!  Why would they switch to yours?
Do it better.  Don't imitate their mistakes, correct them.
Add features.  Let them scramble to imitate you, rather than vice versa :-)
 
By all means, strive to accept Matlab scripts as input.  And
obviously one would hope that the plots themselves would come out
the same. But none of that imposes any requirement for duplicating
window decorations, or placement, or mouse interactions for that matter.
Is there no functionality you'd like to add that Matlab lacks?


> That said, the current state of Octave's development sources when  
> running gnuplot's development sources with the x11 terminal  is not  
> what we'd like it to be. Octave presently ignores any repositioning/ 
> resizing via the mouse and repositions and resizes the figure to the  
> location specified by the figure's position property. This only  
> happens for the x11 terminal when running development versions of  
> Octave and Gnuplot.

Please clarify.  Do you mean that everything works as intended in
the released versions of Octave + gnuplot, but this has become broken
in the development versions?   Did we actually make things worse by
allowing you to set the terminal size externally?

> This undesirable behavior will be resolved soon (I hope).

-- 
Ethan A Merritt