Re: 18-August-2014 Update on version 5 progress

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

I plan to package a second release candidate for gnuplot version 5
next weekend, unless of course someone points out an important
bug or mis-feature in the currect CVS source that is easily fixable.

The plan is to create a new version 5.0 branch of the CVS source tree.
It will initially hold 5.0-rc2 and will essentially freeze the source for 5.0
except for bug fixes turned up by testing of -rc2.
Development will continue in the main CVS tree, which will be labeled
5.1.   Bug fixes should be applied to both the 5.0 and 5.1 source.
New features added to 5.1 may not appear in the final release package
for 5.0.

Thanks to everyone who test the first release candidate and reported
problems or suggestions for improvement. Many of the issues identified
were immediately fixable and hopefully have been resolved in the
upcoming -rc2 release. 

None of this will affect the planned release of 4.6.6 in September/October,
which will probably be the last release in the 4.6 series.

Changes between 5.0 -rc1 and -rc2
=============================

* NEW grey out key entries when corresponding plot is toggled off
* NEW allow parenthesized expressions as call parameters
* NEW command "set margins <left>, <right>, <top>, <bottom>"
* NEW command "set trange [theta_min:theta_max] filters polar mode input data
* NEW command "set mouse zoomfactors <xfact>,<yfact>"
* NEW matrix keywords for text data: "columnheaders" and "rowheaders"
* CHANGE apply "set key {no}enhanced}" to the key title
* CHANGE scale dashlength with line width (not yet done for all terminals)
* CHANGE apply default rectangle style during "set obj" rather than when drawn
* FIX width adjustment for long key title in multicolumn keys
* FIX treat data value read as "NaN" the same as we would "1/0"
* FIX pointtype PT_CHARACTER in 3D plots
* FIX do not store long strings (e.g. epslatex_header) in terminal options
* FIX extra resize of initial qt window may fix problems on OSX, Debian
* FIX handling of events triggered by closing the qt plot window
* FIX refresh of plot with log-scaled color box
* FIX MSWin pipe issues
* FIX if terminal is in "monochrome" mode, convert color requests to black
* FIX various bugs related to the new dashtype code (there are surely more!)


Unresolved issues
=================

- The wxt terminal does not work with wxWidgets 3.0 (wxgtk3).
  No fix is known and so far as I know no one is working on it.
  The problem is made worse for Debian/Ubuntu users because Debian
  plans to drop support for wxWidgets 2.8.

- Initialization and resizing of the qt terminal may still have
  problems on OSX (and other platforms?).

- The lua terminal does not accepts ARGB color specifiers
  (alpha is ignored).

- There is general agreement that the "dashlength" property of
  dashed lines should scale with the linewidth.  Not all terminals
  have yet been modified to act this way. 

- Version 5 terminals default to enhanced text mode.  This change
  broke some scripts.  While "set termoption noenhanced" restores the
  Version 4 default, this command is not persistent.  I.e. it is lost
  whenever you do another "set term" command.  Should there be
  a new command like "set {no}enhanced" that would apply for an
  entire gnuplot session?  Maybe it could offer finer control:
    set {no}enhanced {titles} {tics} {labels} {key}

- A similar issue exists for terminals with a "monochrome" mode.
  Should there be a global "set monochrome {some options}" command?
  Would this clobber all current linetype definitions, or would 
  there be a separate parallel set of monochrome linetypes, or what?

- The <space> (raise console) and <q> (close plot window) hot keys
  do not work consistently for different terminal types.  It would
  be preferable to move this functionality into the core mouse.c
  code and get rid of the special-case code in the individual 
  terminal drivers.  This is not a release-blocker, however, and may
  have to wait until after the final version 5.0 release.

		Ethan Merritt (sf...@us...)