Re: [Plplot-general] plplot-5.2.0

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

On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Valerij Pipin wrote:

> I've got the announcement about plplot-5.2.0 release. First of all, many
> thanks to maintainers for such a nice software.
>  May I ask a question? Does the tar file of release differ from the today's
> cvs tree?

That's a good question, Valerij.

It is the same underlying software exactly (except for one minor commit at
this time), but the tarball has been massaged to make life easy for the
user.  So yes, CVS and tarball are quite different.  Note this is the norm
for software releases of many different free software packages now.  In
general, CVS users are expected to have all the latest/greatest development
tools while that requirement is dropped for tarball users.

In the specific case of PLplot, the required tools for using CVS are
swig-1.3.17 (used to generate both the python and java interfaces), and the
latest autotools packages (used to generate the configure script and the
various *.in files in the various directories). Specifically, the autotools
package versions that work are autoconf-2.57, automake-1.7.2, and
libtool-1.4.3.  You can generate the equivalent of the tarball with these
specific tools installed by (a) making scripts/make_tarball.sh executable
(we need shell access to the repository to fix this permissions problem
permanently), and then by executing scripts/make_tarball.sh.  If you look in
that script you will see it runs .bootstrap.sh (which generates configure
and the various *.in files using autoconf, automake, and libtool), fixes
some additional permissions problems, downloads the generated documentation
from the website, prepares the python and java interfaces using swig, and
prepares the tcl interface using perl.

I didn't look at your errors in detail, but I am virtually positive they are
due to incorrect versions of the autotools packages and/or swig.

Alternatively, if you want to do things the easy way, you can just download
the tarball that was prepared in exactly the above way with the correct tool
versions.  In that case you will not need to run swig, autoconf, automake,
or libtool so their versions on your system become irrelevant. Furthermore,
the permissions will be right, and you will also have all the documentation.
With the tarball you just need to run configure; make, and make install, and
be happy...;-)

Thanks, Valerij, for your interesting question.  I am also looking forward to
your report on using the tarball (or scripts/make_tarball.sh with the correct
versions of the various developer tools) since you usually tend to run PLplot
on platforms which we have no access to.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes on the platforms you have access to.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and
Analysis (www.cccma.bc.ec.gc.ca) and the PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org).

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Linux-powered Science
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