[Gnuplot-bugs] Unhelpful

[Kevin O'G. <kog...@pa...>]

I followed instructions from "help bugs" as best I could, and seem to have gotten an unhelpful response.  I only found it because, being curious, I checked the bugs page on sourceforge.  As I wrote in the report, I'm new to gnuplot, so I'm not a member of your team and don't get followups unless you specifically cc me (or however you do that with SF tools).  Unless you do that, you're making it harder for non-insiders to help with improving the product.  But I did see it ans I'll go through this and fix up the report.

BTW, your FAQ on SF says to put bugs on a Usenet group.  You might want to rethink that.  It differs from "help bugs" advice.  Moreover, yahoo has just informed me they're dropping usenet support and advised me there are places that will sell me the service; if this is a trend, expect usenet to become a lot less popular.  Anyway, it's so spammified and flame-filled I haven't used it in over a decade.

"Help bugs", on the other hand suggests uploading directly to sourceforge, but gives no hints how to do that.  Don't you need permissions for that sort of thing?

Also, your "help bugs" says "See `Seeking-assistance`", but I could not figure out how to find that.  So I didn't see it, and couldn't follow it.  It does not appear to be a help topic or a filename.

>Re: [Gnuplot-bugs] Broken demos
>From: Hans-Bernhard Bröker <HBBroeker@t-...> - 2009-06-22 20:15
> Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>
>> I'm new to gnuplot, so I wanted to view the demos. Six of them
>> failed to run due to errors.
>
>... and if you had told us what those errors were, somebody might even
>be able to help you fix that.

I broke it down to specific ones.  I expected you'd try at least one.  Specific instructions: "gnuplot margins.dem" and hit the return key when prompted.  If you get an error, that's the bug.  If not, the bug is probably in my setup and I shouldn't bother you any more.  Similarly for the other 5.

>> I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 on intel x86, gnuplot seems to be 2.4.3-1 as packaged by Ubuntu.
>>I'm quite sure you've got that version number wrong.

Uh.  right.  It is 4.2.3-1.  Sorry, I'm typing as best I can with a cast on some of my fingers .  But it raises the issue that "help bugs" does not mention how to get the real version number (the FAQ does, and now that I have found it, I'm happy to report:)
gnuplot> show version long 

    G N U P L O T
    Version 4.2 patchlevel 3 
    last modified Mar 2008
    System: Linux 2.6.27-11-generic

    Copyright (C) 1986 - 1993, 1998, 2004, 2007, 2008
    Thomas Williams, Colin Kelley and many others

    Type `help` to access the on-line reference manual.
    The gnuplot FAQ is available from http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/

    Send bug reports and suggestions to <http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot>

Compile options:
+READLINE  -LIBREADLINE  +HISTORY  +BACKWARDS_COMPATIBILITY  +BINARY_DATA  
+GD_PNG  +GD_JPEG  +GD_TTF  +GD_GIF  +ANIMATION  
+NOCWDRC  +X11  +X11_POLYGON  +MULTIBYTE  +USE_MOUSE  +HIDDEN3D_QUADTREE  
+DATASTRINGS  +HISTOGRAMS  +OBJECTS  +STRINGVARS  +MACROS  +IMAGE  

DRIVER_DIR     = "/usr/lib/gnuplot"
GNUPLOT_PS_DIR = "/usr/share/gnuplot/gnuplot/4.2/PostScript"
HELPFILE       = "/usr/share/gnuplot/gnuplot.gih"

>
>> The demos were downloaded from Sourceforge yesterday.
>
>That's pointless --- you already have the demos for your version of
>gnuplot. They're (supposed to be) part of the package you installed. 

Ah, but they are not included in the Ubuntu package, at least not anyplace obvious like /usr/share/gnuplot (which has other gnuplot stuff).  I'm not a total fool, even if it seems that way sometimes.  I just tried gentoo, and
they are not included there by default either (the "doc" use-flag is required).

The failures occurred when I tried "gnuplot all.dem", in the following subdemos
margins.dem
random.dem
binary.dem
pm3d.dem
datastrings.dem
image.dem
In each case the demo had to be removed or commented out in order to continue the "all.dem"
run, so these are "show-stoppers" of a sort.  Try those *.dem files individually to see the error; they're pretty quick and the failures pretty obvious.

Hope this helps.

CC followups to the email below, please.


--  
Kevin O'Gorman, Ph.D.  (805) 756-2986(work)  mailto:kog...@pa...
Home Page: http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~kogorman