Re: Plans for gnuplot version 5

[Ethan A M. <sf...@us...>]

On Wednesday, 05 March, 2014 22:37:23 Juhász Péter wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-03-05 at 09:52 -0800, Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> I cannot help but mention that I've always found the definition,
> interaction and documentation of linetypes and linestyles confusing and
> somewhat redundant.
> 
> In my opinion, "linetype" should mean the line pattern (continuous vs.
> dashed vs. dotted vs...) and only that, while linestyle should encompass
> all attributes that a line can have (color, pattern, pointinterval
> etc.).
> The two should be decoupled and clearly differentiated.
> Linetype (meaning pattern, as defined above) should be settable
> independently, on its own.

 Allowing a bit of non-backwards compatibility is one thing.
Breaking every gnuplot script in existence is quite another!

If "lt N" and "lt N+1" no longer produce distinguishable lines
then I think no one will use gnuplot any more.  The use of dot/dash
patterns to distinguish lines is only realistic for high resolution
(mostly print) devices.   So no, I do not think we can even consider
abandoning the idea that a linetype encompasses more than the
dot/dash pattern.

> This is the main thing, while user-definable, custom linetypes (possibly
> even with fancy syntax like "---..") would be a nice plus.
> 
> I might try to implement this when I have the time, provided that you
> agree.

I think it would be great to introduce a new fundamental property,
"dashtype | dt" I suppose, that is shared by all capable terminals
and ignored by non-capable terminals.   I think it would be a lot of
work but I don't immediately see that it would break compatibility.

> Also, may ask what is your proposed timeline for 5.0?

That's what I'm trying to determine.

If there are no more incompatible changes to make, then so far as
I am concerned a snapshot of the current development tree can become
a 5.0.rc1 snapshot as soon as the version information is changed.
But if there are to be additional major changes to the syntax, 
they should be implemented and tested first internally before
releasing an rc1 snapshot for external testing.

	Ethan