Aquaterm version (was: Qt on Mac)

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

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 02:36, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>> > sfeam wrote>
>> > Do you have a set of instructions we could include with 4.6 that tells
>> > people where/how to get a version of aquaterm compatible with current
>> > OSX and gnuplot?
>>
>> The latest released version of AquaTerm is compatible with Mac OS X
>> 10.4-10.7 (and probably later), with PowerPC, i386 and x86_64, so that
>> should be no problem.
>
> Aha. So I'm glad I asked for instructions.
>
> The information on the Aquaterm SourceForge page is different from what
> you give above.  There it says Aquaterm 1.1 is x86 only, and only tested
> on 10.5 and 10.6.  The previous version (Aquaterm 1.0.1) works on PPC under
> 10.5 and I can't quite figure out what it is saying about OSX 10.1 to 10.4.

I just realized that it was my bad memory about 10.4. It was a
deliberate decision to only support 10.5 in binary distribution for
several reasons (this kind of installer doesn't work on 10.4,
configuration scripts should be way more complex because a different
compiler would have to be used for different architectures, the old
version for 10.4 is still available, one can alway compile from source
etc.).

The README says that binary release supports Intel only. This doesn't
mean that it supports i386 and x86_64 (so both 32-bit and 64-bit).
What I honestly didn't know is that there were no PPC binaries. There
have always been in testing releases and the source code that I have
(https://github.com/gnuplot/aquaterm_aquaterm/blob/master/AquaTerm.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj)
lists PPC everywhere next to x86_64, so I have no idea why it was
dropped. (Still, given that the previous version works fine on PPC and
that this one hardly changes anything but adds 64-bit support, and
that PPC is heavily phased out, this is hardly critical. And building
from source should also work fine.)

> So is the information on the SourceForge page out of date,
> or is there another place to pull it from, or what?

I messed up a few things about 10.4 (also because I still have files
that make it possible to build for 10.4 and all three architectures,
they were just not included in the final release), PPC is indeed not
included when I check my binaries (I don't know why - it has always
been discussed that they would be), binaries work on 10.7 and have
indeed not been tested on 10.7 when AquaTerm was released. I don't
dare to claim anything, but it is quite possible that pre-last version
of AquaTerm works on 10.1-10.4.

However nobody cares about 10.1 any more. Many software doesn't even
support 10.5 any more. Apple's compilers always worked 2 versions
back. But the latest XCode is only able to compile binaries for 10.6
now.

Note that the source code of AquaTerm is still written in such a way
that it should probably still compile on 10.1. (Speculating a bit, but
not far from truth.) The only problem is that project files are not
compatible.

But I see no need for any special instructions in Gnuplot, like you
don't provide any instructions how to install wxt or qt or png/jpg or
other libraries. (What is really needed is a good Mac installer or
standalone application.)

I'm sorry for some slightly wrong & confusing claims.

Mojca

PS: users may influence AquaTerm behaviour (once gnuplot has already
been compiled) by setting the following two variables (just examples):
   export AQUATERM_PATH=/path/to/Applications/AquaTerm.app
   export DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH=/Library/Frameworks/
The first variable controls which AquaTerm.app will be launched in
case that there are many installed on the system and the second one
controls which Frameworks (dynamic library) will be used in case that,
say, AquaTerm is installed both under /Library/Frameworks and
/opt/Library/Frameworks for example (but may have other unexpected
side effects) .