Re: Gnuplot version 5 release candidate

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

On Friday, 06 June, 2014 11:39:53 Pieter-Tjerk de Boer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've given the 5.0-rc1 release candidate a try, and a few minor things
> caught my attention:
> 
> * The .tgz source tarball doesn't seem to contain the release notes.

Yeah, the packaging script failed to include it.
I've fixed the script so that subsequent packages will include the release notes.

> * The section in the release notes on potentially backward-incompatible
>   changes does not mention the change of the default colorsequence on
>   many terminals.
>   This change doesn't stop old scripts from working, but the output
>   produced is different, which can be an issue in case of non-interactive
>   use (e.g., automatic plots on a website, with surrounding text referring
>   to colours in the plot).

FYI the old behavior is available via "set colors classic".

> * The fit command in some cases interprets one column as errors, for
>   compatibility with pre-5.0 versions, according to `help fit`.
>   Perhaps it's an idea to change this, making 'noerror' the default,
>   since 5.0 isn't supposed to be fully compatible anyway?
>   That seems more systematic: then the error column is only there when
>   explicitly indicated, and it makes the 'using' specification in case
>   of 2 independent variables similar to what the user expects from splot.

I find myself somewhat by the new keywords also.
The v5 docs appear contradictory. 
First it says:

   If specified using the `errors` or `zerrors` keyword, the last column `s` is
   interpreted as the standard deviation of the corresponding z value and is
   used to compute a weight for the datum, 1/s**2.  Otherwise, all data points
   are weighted equally, with a weight of one. 

That appears to say that "noerror" is the default.  
But then later it says

    [...] this means that you always have to supply z-errors s in a fit with two
    independent variables x, y if you do not specify the `{no}error`  keyword. 

which appears to say that "noerror" is _not_ the default, at least for the 3D 
case.  Hence my confusion.  Do the keywords mean different things in 
the 2D, 3D, and ND cases?

For me the most useful statement in the v5 docs was that the "yerror"
keyword made fit work analogously to "plot with yerrorbars".
Perhaps either the documentation or the keywords themselves could
be made to match better with "plot/splot" commands?

> Regards,
>   Pieter-Tjerk

Thanks for the feedback.

	Ethan