RE: [Plplot-general] Comments and suggestions for PLplot 5.1.0

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

Roberto Hernandez writes:
 > I'd like to thank the developers of PLplot. It's been an extremely 
 > useful utility for me. All the work you guys put into it doesn't go 
 > unappreciated.

Thanks, we always like to hear about happy customers.

 > I downloaded version 5.1.0 recently and I'm trying out some of its 
 > features. While doing that I came up with a couple of suggestions which 
 > I hope will help further the development of an already great utility.
 > 
 > 1. In the source distribution, there are some documentation files that 
 > are quite outdated. For example NEWS still says PLplot is an ALPHA
 > version. Wouldn't it be a good idea to get rid of those? Or do they 
 > contain information that is still valid and not found elsewhere?

Well, the docs are kinda like the source code, we work on 'em as we
can.  There were a number of documentation improvements that actually
did go out with 5.1.0, but of course we have more to do.  It's a never
ending thing.

 > 2. I find the Tk driver to be extremely useful. In fact I used it along 
 > with Octave to build a GUI-driven time-frequency analysis application as 
 > my final project for school. One of the nicest features is being able to 
 > "embed" a plot frame in the GUI window. There were some (not many) 
 > problems during the initialization stage of the GUI when mapping the 
 > plxframe. All of them had simple enough workarounds. However, from my 
 > experience I thought it would be great if PLplot used its own namespace 
 > in Tcl. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to learn a lot about 
 > namespaces, but enough to realize that would make things a lot cleaner 
 > (no conflicts in the global namespace or with procedure names).

Yes, namespace-izing the PLplot TCL code is a desperately important
project.  Actually, there are a lot of projects, either underway or
ought-to-be-underway, in PLplot.  This one is in the o-t-b-u category.
If you'd like to take a swing at it, that would be great :-).

 > 3. One of the items mentioned in the "Remaining Important Bugs" section 
 > of the new version announcement has to do with the 3D shading. While 
 > searching for more information on the subject I came accross Generic 
 > Mapping Tools (http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/gmt.html). It's a GPL 
 > application which produces shaded plots (among other types) from data 
 > sets and outputs EPS files. The website includes some very impressive 
 > examples. Maybe the 3D shading portion of the code could be adapted to 
 > PLplot.

We can't pull GPL code directly into the LGPL PLplot without losing
the leading L.  For things like this, we really need to start with
mathematics, and code from there.  Again, this is a project where
there is no one currently signed up, I think, so submissions would be
welcome.   (Of course looking at what other packages have is fine, I
think, but we just can't directly leverage GPL code without a license
brouhaha). 

-- 
Geoffrey Furnish         fu...@ga...