Re: building with AquaTerm

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

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 05:26, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> On Thursday, March 10, 2011, Allin Cottrell wrote:
>> On Thu, 10 Mar 2011, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>
>> Or rather, with
>>
>>   "-Wl,-framework -Wl,AquaTerm"
>
> How confusing.  The existing command contains "-framework Foundation".
> Are you saying that "-framework Foundation -framework AquaTerm" is wrong?

It is definitely not wrong.
(I admit that I don't know what exactly -WI does, but when I google
for it I see that some projects use it.)

>> You're not going to endear yourself to gnuplot developers by
>> describing this change as a "fix" (= remedy for something broken),
>> when in fact it's a backward-incompatible change to gnuplot
>> configuration dictated by a (prospective) change to the setup of a
>> third-party library.
>
> Indeed. I was under the impression that aquaterm was currently not working,
> and that this was a fix going forward.  Have I got that wrong?

The problem with AquaTerm is that it is currently only available as
32-bit library and thus doesn't work on 64-bit systems (it was
released before OS X 10.6 was available). However MacPorts contains a
64-bit version and there will be a new release of AquaTerm to fix this
situation.


What is not working at the moment is when user has a 64-bit version of
AquaTerm residing inside MacPorts, but gnuplot doesn't find it without
extra LDFLAGS. Using -framework won't help here either, but it will at
least select the systemwide aquaterm by default.

> If it breaks a currently-working configuration procedure, then no,
> we should not adopt this change.

It doesn't break it. The switch -framework AquaTerm already works with
the old version (so for a very long time). Symlink was provided in
past just for the sake of backward compatibility, but the "grace
period" has been long enough.

The only thing it might "break" is the need to provide an extra switch
    LDFLAGS="-F/opt/local/Library/Frameworks"
when compiling on MacPorts (or on Fink). (A "shortcut" for that might
be ./configure --with-aquaterm=/opt/local/Library/Frameworks, but I
don't have any strong opinion about that.)

> Can we just add back the symlinks that Per Persson for some reason
> doesn't like?   The configure script could test for a missing
> symlink and create it if it's not there.

But how would you test for a missing symlink? By first trying to use
"-framework AquaTerm" and if that works, create a symlink in working
directory (possibly pointing to the wrong framework) and then use
-laquaterm instead of the already working "-framework AquaTerm"?

> Or if the license permits, maybe we could rebuild AquaTerm as a shared
> library ourselves and make a copy available for download with gnuplot?

But what exactly is the point (apart from being an alternative for not
changing configuration script)? The new AquaTerm will contain a shared
library inside the framework (just as the old one does), it will only
miss a symlink.

> I could wish that Per, or whatever OSX gurus we have on tap,
> would work on cleaning up the wxt installation on OSX.  The wxt
> terminal has more features than Aquaterm, and has the virtue of being
> cross-platform.  And it seems at least some people have gotten it to
> work, so it's clearly not impossible.

I wish it was working as well, but apparently it needs some extra code
in gnuplot.

Mojca