[Plplot-general] Version 5.0.3 released

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

The PLplot core team is proud to announce the release of PLplot-5.0.3.  This
is the latest stable release and supersedes all previous versions.  To
obtain it go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/plplot and click on the
download link in the "Latest File Releases" area.

=======
Changes
=======

The core team has been active (almost 400 CVS commits) since the release of
5.0.2 seven weeks ago.  The important changes are as follows:

(1) General PNG and JPEG drivers have been added which are based on the
libgd library (available for Unix/Linux/Mac/Windows).  These drivers
encourage the use of PLplot for web applications because the PNG and JPEG
formats are so favoured for the web. We classify these two drivers as
late-beta and we are sufficiently confident of them that we configure them
by default if you have the appropriate headers and libraries installed from
libgd, libpng, libjpeg, and zlib. (You need at least libgd-1.7 to obtain
good PNG images, and at least libgd-1.8 to obtain JPEG images under PLplot.)
For more information on libgd and the additional required libraries please
visit http://www.boutell.com/gd/.

(2) The GNUSVGA driver (see plplot/sys/dos/djgpp) has been rewritten
to use DJGPP V2+ and GRX V2+. The improved driver adds: a cross hair mode; a
locate mode; double buffering; and an XOR mode to the "screen" driver, all
of which now give the driver most functions of the XWIN driver. It also
fixes up: handling of key and mouse events; colormap setting with "-bg"
switch; and now allows non-fatal/ non-volatile switching between graphics
and text mode (i.e. it no longer clobbers the computer, and now preserves the
screen). Additionally (and optionally) the DJGPP driver family now includes
support for TIFF, BMP, and JPG drivers, and the ability to do "hot key"
screen-dumps of the screen images to these formats.

(3) Octave is a mostly Matlab compatible high-level language intended for
numerical computations.  An octave front end has been available for some
years for PLplot-4.99 and has, in fact, been maintained as a Debian package.
However, this PLplot 5.0.3 release is the first attempt to integrate the
octave front end with PLplot-5.  See the README INSTALL USAGE and FGA
(frequently given answers) files in bindings/octave to find out how to use
this front end. Recently, an absolute octave newbie (AWI) was able to get
all the demos mentioned in INSTALL to work interactively for a Debian potato
system. Nevertheless, we classify this version of the front end as mid to
late beta because it has not been tested for a wide variety of environments
yet.  We would welcome reports for this front end.

(4) An experimental Perl front end is just getting underway for PLplot. This
is an exciting project because it adds an important web-scripting
environment to PLplot. Usually, documentation trails code, but in this case
we have the unusual situation where we have parsed our API documentation
chapter (written in DocBook/XML) to create Perl wrappers for the common
PLplot API. With this start we have been able to create the demonstration
Perl script x01.pl which produces identical results to the standard x01c
demo (that was written in C).  For instructions on how to get the Perl
binding to work, read bindings/perl5/README. More perl script demos are in
the works, and we welcome your participation (via the plplot-devel mailing
list, subscribe at http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=2915) in helping to
develop this front end .

(5) A GNOME-compatible driver has been written for PLplot. At this point,
the driver is being rapidly developed with many exciting interactive
capabilities being considered.  If you want to get in on the development of
this driver we urge you to subscribe to the plplot-devel mailing list (see
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=2915).  We classify this driver as
alpha because the interactive features are not complete, but already it is
stable enough to view most of the demonstrations without problems.  If you
want to try this for yourself, use --enable-gnome when you configure PLplot,
and for any demo specify gnome as the driver.

(6) Many other small changes.  The important ones include the following:

(a) A test script.  After you have built and installed the demo programmes
(go to $prefix/share/doc/plplot/examples and execute make cdemos in the c
directory, fdemos in the f77 directory, cxxdemos in the c++ directory) then
plplot-test.sh will generate all possible postscript file results for all
demos.  (Use the --help option to explore other file driver possibilities.)
This script is an excellent way to test that you have built everything
properly on your system.

(b) A plplot-config configuration script to help you build your PLplot
applications.  Do plplot-config --help to learn how to use it.

(b') We have changed a library name.  The matrix library core name is now
libtclmatrix.  A d suffix is applied to the name (just as for all other
libraries) if the library is built with --with-double=yes configured.  If
you are using the plplot-config script to help link your applications, then
this library name change should be transparent to you.

(c) Added plshades routine to make life much easier for generating
continuously shaded plots.  See x16c for a demonstration.

(d) Small change in exclusion API for shade plots.  (If you are not
excluding regions of your shade plots this does not affect you.) For an
example of the new exclusion API for plshades see x16c.c.  The excluded
annulus now actually is smooth--a nice improvement. See plshades.c for the
changes to the plshade exclusion API.

(e) Added argument list processing for xw??.py demos.

(f) Bug fix.  Clip was not being applied to fills, now is.

(g) x10.tcl and x15.tcl added to demos.

(h) float --> PLFLT throughout the code.  This change exterminates much of
the single precision that was contaminating the code (with consequent large
roundoff errors that differed from machine to machine) when
--with-double=yes is configured.  Comparison of 32-bit and 64-bit results
for x??c now indicates identical postscript files except for date (of
course) and the x05c and x16c examples (which still must have some
single-precision contaminating them somewhere.) Other demos still need to be
checked for single-precision contamination in addition to the fundamental
x??c examples.

(i) Package relocatability put in.  This is essential for building debs and
rpm's.

(j) Assorted documentation improvements including adding a Chapter entitled
"Notes for each Operating System that We Support".  So far only filled with
somewhat sparse information on Unix/Linux.  If you want to contribute some
documentation for other platforms, feel free to send the material to AWI,
and he will include it.

======================
Warning for the future
======================

A nice dynamically loaded drivers capability has been developed on a CVS
branch, and it will soon go into the main branch at HEAD for final
stabilisation work.  It is just too difficult to support this facility for
all varieties of Unix make so we have decided to only support the GNU
version of the make command from now on (but not in the 5.0.3 which was just
released). This will have no effect on our Linux users.  It will immediately
affect our Unix CVS users and will also affect all Unix users of our next
version (which as always will be released from CVS HEAD).  So Unix users
should get GNU make.  You have been warned.

=======
Testing
=======

The djgpp changes have been tested under win-3.1.  Reports of any other
window's experience with this software are welcome.

We did extensive Linux tests. Our primary testing environment was a Debian
potato machine. On that machine we ran plplot-test.sh in both tmp and the
installed area for both the psc and png drivers. We did interactive tests
with the GNOME driver, and with the octave front end.  x01.pl was also
tested. We did additional more limited testing on 5 additional Linux
machines available to us (combinations of RH 6.2, RH 7.0, Suse-7.0, and
Debian potato on 32-bit and 64-bit architectures).  On these machines we
built all possible demonstration result files using plplot-test.sh. The only
substantial problem that occurred in all this Linux testing was some
permissions difficulties on Suse-7.0.  The cause of those is still being
investigated (and may in fact not be a problem if you use the tarball with
already set permissions as opposed to anonymous CVS access to obtain the
source).  For our final Linux tests we also successfully built the
documentation both on Debian potato and RH 6.2.

Our Unix tests were substantially more limited than our Linux tests. The
SourceForge compile farm Solaris machine is currently inaccessible, but we
got good test results for PLplot 5.0.2 on Solaris so there is a good chance
that everything will work fine on Solaris for 5.0.3.  We have also
successfully tested PLplot 5.0.3 on a Dec alpha running OSF1.  We have made
some inroads on configuration and compilation problems that occurred for
PLplot-5.0.2 for HPUX, but we don't have access to that OS so any HPUX
testing will have to be done after the fact by our users.

Reports are welcome (especially using plplot-test.sh) for all OS/hardware
combinations.  It is only through such reports (and patches that work for
you) that we can improve our cross-platform support.

Alan W. Irwin

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 
__________________________

Linux-powered astrophysics
__________________________