Observations on the 4.6rc1 windows package

[Juhász P. <pet...@gm...>]

Dear gnuplot-beta list members,

I had to do some work with gnuplot on a windows machine, and I've have
some comments on the windows version of 4.6rc1.

- I agree with the previous discussion that the old style zip package
has to be provided as an alternative, but overall I think it's good that
we finally have an installer. For the majority of windows users, this is
what makes sense, while they are unfamiliar with zip packages.

- The installer opens the windows-specific readme file at the end of the
installation, however, the file appears garbled in Notepad because the
line endings are \n instead of \r\n which is usual on windows. Most
editors can handle this but Notepad (at least on Vista) can't.

- On one of my machines, startup appeared to be extremely slow, taking
about 5 minutes (!). This is true for both the console and GUI versions.
For the first few tries I've actually killed the process, because I
didn't have the patience to wait it out. Once it started, it appeared to
work normally, there were no delays and plotting was instantaneous as
well. (Older versions had a long delay at the first plot because of
fontconfig or whatever.)
This happened in both interactive and non-interactive mode, however,
only on a virtual machine running Vista. On a real computer running
Windows 7, startup was instantaneous.
I have no idea what causes this, and why it appears on one machine but
doesn't on the other. Have any of you experienced anything similar?
I think this issue is potentially serious, because those who meet with
it unsuspectingly may end up thinking that gnuplot is completely useless
- "I've clicked on the icon", they would say, "but nothing happened!"

- The reworked windows terminal is awesome! To everyone who contributed
to it: good work! I miss the "previous zoom" button from the wxt
terminal, though.

Péter Juhász