Re: Configuration options [was: Policy question - to PM3D or not to PM3D?]

[<ha...@on...>]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 06:14:02PM +0200, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> >
> >On Wednesday 13 July 2005 08:17 am, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:
> >>
> >>I still haven't fully given up revitalizing the 16-bit
> >>builds yet (I've got DOS16 to link with OW, a third-party linker and
> >>some serious modifications...). These 10 percent of extra load could
> >>easily kill those.
> >
> >I think that effort would be a total and utter waste of your time.
> >Anyone runinng 16-bit DOS can just live with version 3.7
> 
> I think so too. Those old PC's are not used for image processing anyway, 
> so they have no reason to switch to gnuplot >= 4.0.
> 
...
> 
> >In particular PM3D is now so integral to many new features that I
> >think it would make no sense for anyone to upgrade past version 4.0
> >and *not* include PM3D.  Why go out of our way to support a
> >combination of options that doesn't make any sense?
> >
> >So yes, I think the PM3D code should be made unconditional.
> 
> I will do this change within one week if there is no really strong 
> objection.
> 

Has there been a consensus on such a change in the direction of 
gnuplot development?

From the gnuplot home page "Gnuplot is a portable command-line driven 
interactive data and function plotting utility for ...many platforms 
... has grown to support many non-interactive uses, including web 
scripting and integration as a plotting engine for third-party 
applications like Octave."

PM3D support adds image processing but that is an option in v4.0.
Users who have no need for the image processing features, who do 
not have graphics hardware to support PM3D graphics, or to whose 
OS PM3D is not ported can build a v4.0 executable without PM3D 
support.

You seem to be taking the position that portability and local 
configurability of gnuplot are no longer goals, rather that newer 
versions of gnuplot are intended solely for systems capable of being 
used for image processing and that, consequently, other improvements 
which might be of value for data and function plotting on older 
platforms (e.g., expanded features for labels, keys, strings, and 
the postscript terminal, font selection, the histogram style, multi-plot 
layout, etc.) will not be made available to users unless they can and
do build with PM3D support.

While it is an additional burden on developers to code and test
w/ and w/o PM3D support, and building w/o PM3D support on Linux 
platforms may have little impact on resources, I believe requiring
gnuplot users to include PM3D support is a major change that may 
affect portability.
 
Since PM3D is still conditional in the cvs build, I would advocate not
removing the build option until after a v4.1 release so that the other 
new features may be made available to a broader user base and at which
time some user feedback can be obtained about the impact of requiring 
PM3D on other platforms.


- Lucas Hart
  Oregon State University
  Corvallis, Oregon USA