Re: [Plplot-general] Welcome to the new era of PLplot!

[Geoffrey F. <fu...@ac...>]

Burkhard Neinhues writes:
 > With the CVS open for the public development should be much easier.
 > However I cecked out the latest CVS sources and I missed some files
 > which are neccessary to generate the configure file.  Is it
 > possible for you to include them ?

Those are under plplot/cf.  Cd there, and issue "autoconf".  You will
need autoconf 2.12 I think.  Then mv configure ..

 > BTW, is there any reason to link nearly all files in a tmp directory
 > before actually compiling them?

This is an involved topic.  I am well aware of the way that
autoconf-based projects ordinarily use the "compile in place" mode of
operation.  I have a number of beefs with that development model.  I
guess it works okay if all you have to do is download some pacakge and 
run configure; make; make install.  That's all most people do with the 
average autoconf based package they pull of prep.ai.mit.edu.

My feeling is that this is woefully inadequate for software
/development/, as opposed to merely "software building" described
above.

For one thing, PLplot supports a bazillion different configurations,
OS's, etc.  I find it very handy to be able to mkdir tmp1 tmp2 tmp3
tmp-u-name-it, and run a different variation of configure in each, so
that all can be regression tested simultaneously against the same
identical sources.

Yes, I know, --srcdir could be applied here.  Another beef I have with 
that model, is the difficulty of combining many build products whose
sources live in many different directories, into a single library if
using that model.

 > Another option would be the use of libtool to generate the
 > library. I may be able to incoporate this, but it would be nice to
 > have the files to regenerate the configure script as a start.

All in all, I much prefer to stick with the softlinking to tmp motif,
but if someone wants to overhaul the build rules themselves to use
libtool for building archive/shared libs uniformly on all known-by-GNU
platforms, that sounds like welcome improvement to me.

Anyway, see plplot/cf.

-- 
Geoffrey Furnish            Actel Corporation        fu...@ac...
Senior Staff Engineer      955 East Arques Ave       voice: 408-522-7528
Placement & Routing     Sunnyvale, CA   94086-4533   fax:   408-522-8041

"... because only those who write the code truly control the project."
						      -- Jamie Zawinski