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

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

On Saturday 28 November 2009, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure what's going on under cygwin, but this is a bit
> tricky on Linux.  Gnuplot uses pkg-config to test for lua, but a
> stock installation of lua-5.1.4 using "make linux install" does
> not install the lua.pc file.  

Eh?  It installs normally for me.  The *.pc ends up here:
   /usr/lib/pkgconfig/lua.pc

lua -v
Lua 5.1.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio

> There is such a file under etc/ in
> the source tree, but it's broken: the lua library requires linkage
> to libdl but this is not registered in the "Libs" section of the
> file.
> 
> It's therefore necessary to fix lua.pc and install it manually,
> before gnuplot will build the lua/tikz terminal. (I don't count
> this as a gnuplot bug; it's a lua build bug.)
> 
> 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 gave up on this ages ago.  kpsexpand is terminally broken on
all my machines.  No idea how it's supposed to work, but clearly
it doesn't.   That's why it's disabled by default in configure.in.

These problems are not new to the luz-tikz driver, however.
Gnuplot has always tried to install a TeX style file, and always been
subject to strangeness in kpsexpand or local TeX directory conventions.
I think this is one of those things that varies so much, the only hope
is that each linux distro will decide for itself where the files should
go and build that information into the distro's gnuplot package.