Re: proposal for cvs'ing 'with image'

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:

>>>I propose clean up of datafile.c, if you really find this necessary, after
>>>the patch is in cvs. The patch is quite big, and its maintenance as a
>>>patch needs more effort than necessary. Thus I propose to commit the patch
>>>ASAP.
>>>      
>>>
>
>OK, I guess.
>But please let's try to get df_readline() cleaned up as the very next thing.
>

What are the goals proposed for cleanup?  I'd offer up a few intial goals:

1. Clean up the df_readline() routine for neatness.  If that means a 
couple subroutines, that's fine.  But even though that function is 
somewhat big, it's flow of logic is pretty straightforward.

2. Integrate the "gnuplot binary" into the more general binary routine 
with a few lines of code.  Then drop the special routine for reading 
"gnuplot binary" and if I recall correctly there are a bunch of routines 
at the end of "datafile.c" that aren't used and could be discarded. 
 (Can always retrieve them from CVS.)

3. Decide a convention of how to properly incorporate info in a datafile 
into the plot style.  There was some discussion about histograms and 
other plot styles that assume something based upon what is in the data 
file, i.e., whether that sort of thing should be done, and if so how 
best to do it.

>And please check one final time that the patched version of datafile.c
>does not inadvertantly back out other changes made since 4.0.
>

How does one check that?  Compare a diff between current CVS and Gnuplot 
4.0 with the patch file?  Any mods to CVS not matching what the patch 
file has for the first few lines of code before and after the change 
will cause a reject.  I've never seen anything in the patched code lost 
from patching, only what is in the patch file gets rejected.  The worst 
I've seen is a hunk positioned out of order so that it doesn't compile 
correctly.  (Those can be nasty to debug if it's an openning or closing 
bracket mispositioned.)

Dan