Re: [Plplot-devel] What to do about plmeta/plrender?

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2007-09-01 14:29-0500 Maurice LeBrun wrote:

> Alan W. Irwin writes:
> > I was quite dismayed this morning to "discover" the "-a" issue with plmeta,
> > but obviously it doesn't affect that many users since apparently this
> > limitation has been with us from the first with very few complaints about
> > it.  However, I believe the lack of access to modern fonts is a much more
> > serious issue since it leaves such a bad impression of PLplot capabilities.
> > Thus, regardless of the decision about which of the above options we decide
> > to take, we should change the default option for plmeta to off so that users
> > would have to specifically enable it.
> >
> > Maurice, do you agree with at least this step?  It could be seen as the
> > start to (4) or else as a temporary measure until one of the other options
> > is taken.
>
> I can see marking them as unmaintained and not building either by default, as
> long as there's an easy way to include them in the build again.  Removal seems
> a drastic step for now.  Priorities change, and who knows what will be
> important again in a few years.

OK.  Following your advice I have done the appropriate changes to
our build system as follows:

(1) the plmeta device is disabled by default.  I have put in a comment as to
why. This means interested users would have to specify the -DPLD_plmeta=ON
option to cmake in order to build it.

(2) plrender is not built or installed and the plrender man page is
not installed unless the user specifically has requested the plmeta
device.

I have minimally tested these changes.

I would like to make a remark about this plmeta/plrender status change in
README.release, but that file currently is only in the form relevant for
5.7.4. Hazen, should I just go ahead with this change or is there some
copying to old release notes and reorganization into a form suitable for our
next release that you want to do first?

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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