Re: [Plplot-general] We now strongly encourage testing of the latest pre-release version of PLplot

[Rafael L. <lab...@ps...>]

* Robert Schwebel <ro...@sc...> [2003-04-03 08:36]:

> On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 02:56:25PM -0600, Maurice LeBrun wrote:
> > Unfortunately a limitation of the current system is that it won't work until
> > installed.  Perhaps this limitation will be removed eventually to some extent.
> > But as it stands after building you need to:
> > 
> > make install
> > cd <prefix>/lib/plplot<version>/examples/c
> > make x01c
> > ./x01c
> 
> Hmm, wasn't that why there is a PLPLOT_HOME variable? Normally, from a
> user's point of view, I would like to be able to test a packet locally
> before I spread it's files over my harddisk ;)

You are fully right.  The present situation is unsatisfactory, and there is
a consensus among the developers that it must be improved.  In the past, we
had a different paradigma for building the software, with all the files
being put under a tmp/ directory.  We switched to a autoconf/
automake/libtool based approach, which is expected to be superior in many
regards, but we have lost that test-without-install feature.

Well, not quite.  You can try this:

    cd examples/c
    make x01c
    PLPLOT_DRV_DIR=../../drivers PLPLOT_LIB=../../data ./x01c

This should work with the tarball that you downloaded (this is not
documented, sorry).

Otherwise, you can safely install PLplot after "./configure
--prefix=/some/dir ; make ; make install", and than later "rm -rf /some/dir"
to get rid of all the "files over the harddisk".

At any rate, a clean implementation of this test-without-install feature is
in our agenda, but we prefered not to implement this for the forthcoming
release, because it is expected to be just a bug-fixing release after 5.2.0.

-- 
Rafael