Cygwin + Qt and/or wxt [was Re: OK to put out an -rc2 for version 5.4?]

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

On Saturday, 6 June 2020 23:11:30 PDT Achim Gratz wrote:
> Ethan A Merritt writes:
 
> > 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/
>
> [snip]
> 
> Instead of having outboard drivers running a s a separate process as you
> use for X11 and Qt may driver modules could work?  The problem for
> packagers really is that e.g. wx pulls in about half of the GNOME stack
> as a dependency and it's linked to the executable.  Having that
> dependency chain in a separate library that could be dynlinked if and
> when the driver was actually used would alleviate that problem.

I suppose. But the work involved to disentangle the code in  wxt_gui.cpp
from the core to make it a loadable module would be pretty
much  the same work needed to make it an outboard driver.

Honestly I think it would be less work to get the Qt terminal working. 
But I have never worked on Windows at all and have no particular
desire to start now.  So I can't really debug or try much myself, only make
suggestions and point to possible problem points.   
Is the problem with O_NONBLOCK absolute, i.e. Cygwin will never
accept such a call, or is it just that making this particular connection
non-blocking reveals an unacceptable latency in the initialization?
The former I can't do much about, but the latter we could maybe
work around by having gnuplot_qt return SUCCESS immediately
even though initialization is not complete.

	Ethan

> 
> 
> Regards,
> Achim.