[Plplot-general] plplot-5.0.1 has been released.

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

Get this new stable version as a tarball file release at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/plplot.  It was created from the current
CVS head which has benefited quite a lot from steady bug fixing over the
last few months.  Version 5.0.1 supersedes all previous versions.
(Please note that for stability you should use the tarball release and
not the CVS HEAD.  We ordinarily make no guarantees about the stability of
the HEAD since we want to be free to try things on the HEAD which might
break plplot from time to time.)

Note we also have some innovation in the new release as well as bug fixing.

(1) The documentation building process has been changed completely over to
DocBook 4.1 XML.  To see the nice html, postscript, pdf, dvi, info, and man
results of this effort, please look at
http://www.plplot.org/resources/docbook-manual/

(2) The content of the documentation source has been greatly improved from
previous versions.  However, more work is always needed on documentation
content, and if you have an interest in helping out with this aspect of
plplot, please contact yours truly (Alan W. Irwin).

(3) The header file style has been changed to be similar to that of X.  That
is every header file reference in source should have the prefix plplot, e.g.,

#include "plplot/plConfig.h"

This gives much less potential for nameclashes, if the headers are stored in,
e.g., /usr/include/plplot.  It also means that the -I parameter stays the
same as it was before on the compile line.

(4) The library names have been changed so they are in a more consistent style
now that gives more protection against nameclashes.  All library tags 
(suffixes to the core name of libplplot, libplmatrix, etc.) are
now gone except for d for double precision and nothing for single precision
or the libplmatrix library (which is always single precision even if
you have configured double precision).  To indicate what the library names
that were used to build plrender, execute the installed
$prefix/bin/plplot_linkage.  On my current system this emits the following
line:
-L/usr/local/plplot/lib -lplplotd -lplmatrix -litk3.1 -ltk8.2 -litcl3.1
-ltcl8.2 -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11 -lvga -ldl -lm -lg2c -Wl,-rpath
-Wl,/usr/local/plplot/lib

Your system (if it isn't Debian potato) will have a different link line
emitted by $prefix/bin/plplot_linkage.  That is the one to use!

(5) Python now works! (at least in widgetless mode).  Configure python (which
happens by default), and try out the new widgetless examples, xw??.py.
You will like them!  These examples all require double precision.  Eventually,
we plan to add Tk widget capabilities to these examples.  Any help
would be appreciated.

(6) Fortran now works with double precision and Linux!  (It always worked
well with single precision before, but it is nice to have this generality.)

Tests:

Release version 5.0.1 has been extensively tested on Debian potato with double
precision configured. The cdemos, cxxdemos (c++), fdemos (fortran),
tcldemos, tkdemos, and the new standalone xw??.py python demos all now work
well on potato. Similar tests show good results on RedHat 6.2 except for
Tcl/Tk whose 8.0 version on RH 6.2 is too old for us to support. We have not
yet upgraded our test box to RedHat 7.0, and until we do, we would
appreciate any RedHat 7.0 reports our users could give us. We have also been
able to configure, build, and install the software on a solaris system, but
so far only minimalist testing has been done on that system.  

Putting on my yplot (http://sourceforge.net/projects/yplot) hat momentarily,
I have recently rebuilt yplot, the convenient yorick front end to plplot.
The new yplot version (to be released soon) is based on plplot-5.0.1
libraries, and I have just confirmed it gives excellent results for a wide
variety of 36 different scientific plots from my present research.

Please send bug reports, comments, and questions to this list, and
have fun (and profit) with the new 5.0.1 release of plplot!

Alan

email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902	FAX: 250-721-7715
snail-mail:
Dr. Alan W. Irwin
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055,
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6 
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Linux-powered astrophysics
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