#16 Release pre-compiled binary files with supporting libs for major OSs.

[leoking]

I recently found this comparison between gnuplot and plplot:

http://blog.debroglie.net/2011/12/10/plotting-libraries/

I was astonished to know that plplot is so much more powerful than gnuplot.

However, gnuplot is still far more popular than plplot. I think the main obstacle preventing the popularity of plplot is that it lacks workable binary releases for major OSs.

I can see plplot provides many routines (MiniGW/Cygwin/Borland) to build its binary. However, I feel a normal user (not a developer of plplot) does not really care about which routine plplot is built on as long as it works.

The building process is still far more complex for normal users to go through. These users might not be able to contribute code for the plplot development but they can provide more application examples of charts drawn using plplot.

Really hope such a good project could get more popularity.

[Hazen Babcock]

It is pretty easy to install on linux already using a package manager, so I assume you are mostly referring to Windows? I agree that is not the easiest library to install on Windows. However, it is hard for us to provide a binary as (I don't think) they are interchangeable. For example if we provided a library that was compiled with MinGW could you compile into another application using MSVC?

[Alan W. Irwin]

I agree that binary packages are essential in order for PLplot to gain popularity over other plotting packages which turn out to be not quite as good. However, there are potential security issues with binary packages so I think such packaging efforts should be under the umbrella of a particular free software distribution where the packaging tools for each distribution are designed to take care of security issues.
As Hazen mentioned the PLplot packaging job has already been taken care of for the most popular Linux distributions. For example, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE all have actively maintained binary packages for PLplot. And to add to what Hazen said, this job has also been taken care of on Mac OS X with actively maintained Plplot packages for the Fink, Homebrew, and MacPorts distributions of free software for that platform. So again agreeing with Hazen, that leaves just the Windows case where there are two different free software distributions MinGW-w64/MSYS2 and Cygwin. For MinGW-w64/MSYS2 there is already an existing PLplot package, but it is a bit limited because the packager could not get parts of PLplot to work, that Arjen, for example, has recently shown do work on that platform.
In sum, the only thing that PLplot developers should do in answer to this topic is to help Linux, Fink, Homebrew, and MacPorts packagers with their efforts (see my efforts in that regard for Fedora and Debian packaging on the plplot-devel mailing list); give a needed substantial assist to the packaging effort on MinGW-w64/MSYS2; and initiate a packaging effort on Cygwin.