gnuplot and ConTeXt

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

Dear Xenia,

I'm forwarding your question to the gnuplot mailing list since they
can probably help you better with this issue than people on the
ConTeXt list.

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 09:47, Xenia wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm having some problems with gnuplot.
>>>
>>> I tried the minimal example from http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Gnuplot ,
>>> but I recieve just a .plt-file.
>>
>> 1.) What operating system are you using?
>
> debian-wheezy (testing)
>
>> 2.) Did you compile gnuplot from https://github.com/mojca/gnuplot or
>> did you use the default gnuplot as shipped with your system?
>
> I tried following this instruction:
> http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Gnuplot#Unix_or_Mac
>
> But then I got:
> ---------------------
> $ ./prepare
>
> ./prepare: 47: aclocal: not found
>
> Some part of the preparation process failed.
> Please refer to INSTALL for details.
> ---------------------
>
> And in "INSTALL" and "INSTALL.gnu" the first step is to do
> $ ./configure
> but I only have a configure.in and configure.vms -file.
> I'm quite confused.
> So I installed it from the debian-repositories (for sure without any
> context-implementation), but you could just tell me, how I can make your
> version work. :-)

One option is probably also to patch gnuplot source package from
Debian repositories, I don't know how to do that since I don't use
Debian (but you only need to add context.trm to other terminals and
add one #include "context.trm" line to src/term.h).

The instructions in INSTALL are only valid for released versions when
somebody else runs ./prepare instead of you before publishing the
files. The ./prepare script creates ./configure. It would be really
really helpful if configure script was included in source repository,
but many argue that this would bring additional problems. (It could
indeed happen that the file would get out-of-sync if somebody was
modifying configuration and forgot to run ./prepare afterwards, but
that would be spotted and resolved quickly. It would cause way less
pain to "end users" trying to compile gnuplot from source.)

You probably need to have autoconfigure installed or something like
that. Others may know more precisely what is needed / what Debian
package you need to install.

Mojca