[Plplot-devel] I have retired hpgl, impress, and ljii. Should we retire tek as well?

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

Some recent testing I have done has shown a number of run-time issues
(segfaults and such) with the deprecated hpgl, impress, and ljii devices.
Since no user has complained about these run-time issues, I assume this
means these historical devices have long been completely unused by our
users. Therefore, I have (revision 10263) retired these devices by
commenting out the appropriate part of a list in drivers-init.cmake.  Part
of that revision is an announcement in README.release about the retirement
of these device drivers.

I went ahead with this change because I think it is completely
noncontroversial, but if somebody thinks otherwise I am open to the
possibility of reverting some/all of these changes.

As part of my testing I also noticed that the deprecated tek driver had some
build issues (e.g., incorrectly named PLD_ options and inconsistent use of
such names in tek.c and elsewhere).  This driver contains the following list
of devices:

   "conex:Conex vt320/tek emulator:1:tek:24:conex\n"
   "mskermit:MS-Kermit emulator:1:tek:21:mskermit\n"
   "tek4107t:Tektronix Terminal (4105/4107):1:tek:20:tek4107t\n"
   "tek4107f:Tektronix File (4105/4107):0:tek:28:tek4107f\n"
   "tekt:Tektronix Terminal (4010):1:tek:19:tekt\n"
   "tekf:Tektronix File (4010):0:tek:27:tekf\n"
   "versaterm:Versaterm vt100/tek emulator:1:tek:22:versaterm\n"
   "vlt:VLT vt100/tek emulator:1:tek:23:vlt\n"
   "xterm:Xterm Window:1:tek:18:xterm\n"

In my opinion, the only one of those devices which still might be useful is
xterm, but that is quite lame (e.g., ugly fallback to software fills) and
requires X, and xwin is a much better alternative that also just depends on X.

I would be glad to retire the deprecated tek device driver as well rather
than waste time fixing up the build issues for something that is probably
not used at all.  However, I will wait to do that until it is clear there
are no strong objections from the developers here to that retirement.

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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Linux-powered Science
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