Re: Ready for wrap-up everyone?

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

On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Petr Mikulik wrote:

> What is "Bruce Ravel's gnuplot-mode distribution"? An old binary
> distribution for Windows? Why it contains info file then?

See the final paragraph of INSTALL.  gnuplot-mode used to be part of
gnuplot itself, then it was taken up and developed into a standalone
package by Bruce Ravel.  Lars has integrated a copy of Bruce's work into
the 3.8 series, which has become the 'lisp' subdirectory of gnuplot.

> I don't see this text relevant for gnuplot 4.0. I don't think it has to
> be "README.1st".

It may not have to be in README.1st, but it does have to be somewhere.

> That an impatient user would go and edit something in term.h.

Well, believe it or not, there are indeed cases where people would and
should do that.  We have autoconf choices mainly for those terminals that
require external libraries, but there are quite a number of others for
which the canonical way to disable them *is* to directly edit term.h

> And if you install gd library, you will no get gif support nowadays -- as
> said in FAQ.

And in README.1st.  Which, as it's name says, people are supposed to have
looked into before they read INSTALL.

> > > Also, README.1ST speaks only about GIFs. What about deleting this file
> > > and reference from README to FAQ?
> >
> > README.1st is the first-stop README file for the source distribution.
> > It's not even necessarily being distributed with binary distributions.
> 
> It's nowhere written why and why should read this document.

~The name explains that by itself.  "Read me first!".  That's about the
most obvious you can get.

> For source distribution, one should read INSTALL. 

*After* reading README.1st.  And README.1st should say so.  It will ---
I'm working on it.


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