Re: Cannot build gnuplot4.5 with lua terminal..

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 20:15, Allin Cottrell wrote:
>
> And one other thing: to get lua/tikz to work one needs
> gnuplot-lua-tikz.sty in the right place, but the gnuplot install
> mechanism doesn't get this right -- or at least, not on my system.
>
> I install gnuplot under /usr/local, and my tex tree is rooted at
> TEXMF=/usr/share/texmf.  The gnuplot Makefile under share/LaTeX
> constructs an installdir as follows:
>
> installdir=`kpsexpand \
> ${prefix}/usr/'$$TEXMFLOCAL'/tex/latex/gnuplot | \
> sed "s%^.*share/%$(prefix)/share/%"`
>
> On my system that evaluates as
>
> /usr/local/usr//tex/latex/gnuplot
>
> which is just a mess, and the installed sty file is not found by
> TeX. I think the kpsexpand invocation should be more like:
>
> kpsexpand '$$TEXMF'/tex/latex/gnuplot

I never took a closer look at building scripts, but just a few remarks.

In my opinion it's not very "polite" of gnuplot to mess up the system
installation of TeX (at /usr/local/whatever). It's much better to use
    kpsexpand "\$TEXMFLOCAL/tex/latex/gnuplot"
(Even better would be some less generic name than "gnuplot"; for
example "gnuplot-lua".)

On my system this resolves to
    /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local
or some other random location depending on my current environment
settings (I'm usually switching between different TeX trees very
often).

This is exactly what $TEXMFLOCAL has been designed for, $TEXMF should
be kept for what TeX installer has installed and might be removed
without a warning (if one upgrades or updates the distribution for
example). You also need to keep in mind that there's a chance that
this string is empty - in that case one should not install the sty
file anywhere. And the absence of kpsexpand should not prevent one to
build the terminal itself either.

And then again ... Peter has almost ready a generic version of
terminal (that also works with plain TeX and ConTeXt) that might have
to go to
    kpsexpand "\$TEXMFLOCAL/tex/generic/gnuplot"
or even get split among several folders (generic, latex, context). Not
yet at this moment, but just as a warning that this might need a
change.

Mojca