Re: Purpose of xlib terminal ?

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> Can someone fill me in on the intended use of the xlib terminal?
> Is it primarily just a debugging aid for x11, or a mechanism for piping
> x11 output to something other than gnuplot_x11?

Not really.  Xlib output is supposed to be to the x11 driver what the EMF
driver would be for the Windows driver.  It's essentially a metafile, i.e.
a stored record of drawing commands. In theory, this lets you run gnuplot
itself and gnuplot_x11 on different machines. E.g.:

	rsh somebox gnuplot scriptfile | gnuplot_x11

would run gnuplot remotely, but gnuplot_x11 on the local machine. This
might be useful in setups where X11 traffic is not allowed from the remote
"somebox" to your local one, or where the remote machine doesn't even have
X11.

I don't think anyone in the current team has even the slightest idea how
often this feature was ever used by anyone, or even if it ever was used at
all.

> 'help set term xlib' leads one to believe that the xlib terminal driver
> is the same as x11 except that the output is controlled by 'set output'.

Exactly.  And at the time that was written, this probably was correct.
Since then, bit-rot has done its work.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (br...@ph...)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.