Re: OK to put out an -rc2 for version 5.4?

[Ethan A M. <me...@uw...>]

On Saturday, 6 June 2020 00:26:27 PDT ASSI wrote:
> Ethan A Merritt writes:
> > There have been no major changes since -rc1, but a few of them touch
> > the build + packaging pathway so it would be good to test them.
> 
> FWIW, I have seen no problems with RC1 on Cygwin.
> 
> I'm the maintainer for gnuplot on Cygwin and as long as the Qt/Cygwin
> problem isn't properly solved 

Thank you for reminding me of that problem.
I reviewed the original report and the trail of issues filed with the
Cygwin and Qt upstreams.  It seems that nothing came of either after
the first flurry of investigation.
   
However one point was raised which you might know more of.
As I understand it, the original diagnosis was that Cygwin was using
named pipes to emulate unix sockets. But that was corrected by 
Corinna Vinschen, who said that Cygwin was moving towards using
named pipes but was [at that time] using  loopback IPv4 sockets to 
implement AF_UNIX sockets.  That was more than a year ago.
Has the situation changed?  If switching to named pipes would
resolve this problem and the work is planned anyhow, perhaps it is worth
prodding to see how close to completion it might be?

> I'd thought I should maybe package wxt
> instead (which I recently got working).  However, wxt doesn't produce
> its own executable and pulls in an enormous amount of libraries that
> many people don't want installed.  Is there some build option that I may
> have missed to separate the wxt terminal out (like qt and X11) so it can
> be put in its own package and the non-GUI gnuplot can remain as lean as
> it used to be?

No, sorry.  There is not a gnuplot variant that uses wxWidgets as an outboard
driver.   About 10 years ago there was some work to create one because at the
time the inboard driver did not work on OSX, but it never reached completion
and also I think the OSX problem resolved itself.
   https://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/patches/380/

The thing is, even if you resurrected that patch series to create an outboard
wxt terminal I worry that you would run into exactly the same problem that
is hitting the outboard Qt driver:  you need an inter-process communication
socket, and that seems to be where the Cygwin options are shaky.

Nevertheless, if you want to organize or delegate someone to work on
an outboard wxt terminal driver I'd be happy to kibbutz from the sidelines.

	best,

		Ethan

> Regards
> Achim.
>