[Plplot-general] PLplot 5.0.0 is released

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

Greetings to all,

And you thought it would /NEVER/ happen.  :-).

I am pleased to announce that PLplot version 5.0.0 has been released.
The rest of this email will attempt to explain exactly what this means 
in more detail.

First off, thanks to all the core team members who have helped with
various tasks that I could not attend to.  Not the least of which, is
the simple issue of deciding to do it, right now.

Now for a little background.  We are done with the 4.99 x, x=abc... 
business, as well as the dated snapshots.  Dated snapshots are being
replaced by providing anonymous cvs access through plplot.org.  So
anyone who wants to track day-to-day development, or follow progress
on their patch submissions, etc, will be able to do that by using cvs.

In addition to that, we will provide real releases which are supposed
to be stable, or at least to get stable over a short time.  The
releasing naming conventions will follow the Linux tradition.  Even
releases are supposed to be stable, and only bug fixes and
stabilization patches will be applied to these.  Thus, 5.0.0 is the
first in this strain.  If people find minor little nits that need
fixing, this will result in 5.0.1, 5.0.2, etc.  We hope it doesn't get 
too far...  Ongoing feature development will proceed in the 5.1
strain.

The release and versioning business is coordinated with cvs in the
following manner.  Stable releases go on a branch.  Ongoing
development continues on the cvs head.  To be really cvs technical, we 
provide a branch point tag, a branch tag, and release tags.  So, to be 
totally explicit, I did the following operations today when preparing
the 5.0.0 release:

1) cvs tag bp_v5_0
2) cvs rtag -b -r bp_v5_0 v5_0 plplot
3) cvs tag v5_0_0
4) cvs export -r v5_0_0 plplot
5) mv plplot/ plplot-5.0.0
6) tar cvzf plplot-5.0.0.tar.gz plplot-5.0.0/

Step 1 labels the state of the repository at the point in time when we 
fork the 5.0 release branch.  The name of the branch point for the 5.0 
release, is bp_v5_0.  Step 2 creates a cvs "branch tag" for referring
to the head of this branch.  The name of this tag is v5_0.  Step 3
creates a tag for the specific release 5.0.0, with tag name v5_0_0.
In the current case, there were no changes made between any of these
steps, so steps 1, 2, and 3 all refer to the same versions of the
files.  But as we move on from here, people who wish to participate in 
stabilizing the 5.0 branch will need to check out the head of this
branch via:

    cvs co -r v5_0 plplot

Then they can do stabilization oriented development, submit context
diffs, and the core team will apply these patches, and eventually at
various points along the way, we will tag v5_0_1, v5_0_2, etc.  So,
the thing to understand here is that "v5_0" is the branch tag.  It is
a floating reference, which alwasy points to the head of this branch.
Non branch tags just refer to static file versions, labelling a single
specific collection of file versions for all of time.

Henceforth, the main line of deveopment, which we will call 5.1,
proceeds on the cvs head.  There is no branch tag for this.  To see
the ongoing develoment work on the 5.1 branch, just do:

    cvs co plplot

Use update to track ongoing work, etc.  We may possibly tag a few
interesting points along the way as v5_1_0, v5_1_1, etc, but there
will not be a branch tag for this.  Eventually, when 5.1 development
seems to have run its course, we will fork another branch for 5.2,
making a new branch point tag bp_v5_2, a branch tag v5_2 to refer to
the head of the branch holding the 5.2 release strain, and occasional
tags for specific 5.2.x releases.

Hopefully that is comprehensible to people with a cvs background.  See 
the CVS faq for more background.  We'll try to put this kind of info
on the web site somewhere as we get better organized.

Anyway, in addition to the cvs access mechanisms described above, we
also are providing the 5.0.0 release as a .tar.gz file.  Steps 4, 5,
and 6 show exactly how this was created, guaranteeing that the
plplot-5.0.0.tar.gz file contains exactly the file versions that were
tagged as v5_0_0 in step 3, but omitting the CVS control information.
This tarball release is appropriate for people who just want the code
in a packaged form, and aren't interested in tracking the cvs
development specifically, or even in using cvs to fetch identified
versions.  This file has been uploaded to the plplot.org ftp site.
You can get it via:

    /ano...@ft...:/pub/plplot/plplot-5.0.0.tar.gz

Eventually we will get the www.plplot.org web site updated to reflect
this, and also figure out how to identify this file release on the
sourceforge.net project page for plplot.  Someone will post messages
about that as we progress in these other areas.  

Anyway, the bottom line is, right now you can get PLplot 5.0.0, either
by anonymous ftp, or by anonymous cvs.

Now for a word about the contents of 5.0.0.

The main thing that has happened over the past three years since I
escaped graduate school, is that we've been trying to fix bugs in the
autoconf support, and in the Tcl/Tk driver, and in color handling of
the X driver.  There have been a great many bugs rooted out of the
system over this period of time, and I would encourage all PLplot
users worldwide, to upgrade to 5.0.0 at this time.  This release is
known to work with 8.x strain Tcl/Tk releases, Itcl 3 releases, Python 
1.5, etc.  The problems with X color management are believed to be
resolved in a manner that is generally satisfactory (there's always
room for improvement in this area, but the current state is a big leg
up over where it was before in the 4.99j or in the early snapshots).
And numerous patch submissions from users worldwide have been
integrated (although admittedly there are more outstanding, pending
core team review).  There is also a new Mac driver by Rob Managan.
Currently just the necessary source and doc files, but we will get his 
Mac CW project support goods uploaded to ftp.plplot.org at some point
too.  So, there's been lots of improvement since the last release, and 
I hope people will endeavor to upgrade to this new version.  If things 
go wrong, please submit patches to sourceforge.net, and we'll work on
getting it stabilized.  

In the midst of such endeavors, please note the distinction between
bug fixes to 5.0.x, and feature development for ongoing 5.1.  The new
stuff is going to go into 5.1.  5.0.x is really there just to have an
up to date stable and official release for those who don't want to
track ongoing development.  As such, don't expect major new features
to appear in 5.0.x releases, just fixes that relate to platform
support, minor bugs, etc.

So, what lays ahead for 5.1?  Well, like I said before, that depends a 
lot on what people contribute.  My personal actions will focus in the
short term on better Tcl package participation and improved Python
module interaction.  But there are more drivers in the works, web
integration opportunities, more plot types, variations, and viewing
overhauls, etc, that various people have expressed interest in.  More
news as it happens.

Remember that you can track it all by subscribing to
plp...@pl..., or by reviewing the lists chronology in
geocrawler.  Or, you can use the cvs history command (also easily
accessible in Emacs fromt he version control pane), to see what people 
are doing, track your patch submissions to see when they get in, etc. 

Cheers to all,

-- 
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