[Plplot-general] [irwin@beluga.phys.uvic.ca: Announcing today's experimental test PLplot tarball]

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

----- Forwarded message from "Alan W. Irwin" <ir...@be...> -----

From: "Alan W. Irwin" <ir...@be...>
Subject: Announcing today's experimental test PLplot tarball
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 11:37:15 -0700 (PDT)
To: Rafael Laboissiere <lab...@ps...>

Here is a new version of the experimental PLplot tarball for testing
purposes on Mac OS X and Cygwin (or any other platform where you want to be
on the PLplot cutting edge).  See the Debian stable, Mac OS X and Cygwin
status reports below.  All are looking pretty good!

Use at your own risk!  There are still some security concerns with the
Debian unstable libtool-1.5 application we used to build this tarball, but
James Remnant is adamant (see his public remarks in response to my concerns
at
http://www.mail-archive.com/deb...@li.../msg10149.html)
that he has tracked every change in cvs for a long time since well before
the cracker rooted the GNU ftp server, and therefore no malicious code can
possibly be in the Debian unstable libtool-1.5 package. So please review his
remarks, and make your own judgement call on this issue.

what: plplot-5.2.1.cvs.20031002.tar.gz and
plplot-5.2.1.cvs.20031002.tar.gz.asc (detached PGP signature.  Use gpg
--verify to verify that there are no transmission errors and that Rafael is
the source of these files).

where: the usual test tarball site;
http://people.debian.org/~rafael/plplot.html.  Thanks, Rafael, for producing
this.

I have tested this tarball on my Debian stable system both for ./configure
defaults (which implies enabling of shared libraries and dynamic drivers)
and for the combination of --disable-shared and --disable-dyndrivers.  There
were no obvious build problems and all test examples built and gave good
results.

I have just incorporated a series of improvements in PLplot which got into
this new experimental tarball.  This effort incorporated much appreciated
feedback from Rob Managan with results on his Mac OS X system and Ullal
Devappa Kini with results on his Cygwin system.
_______________________________________________

Here is a summary of the current PLplot status on Mac OS X.  (For Cygwin
results see below.)

* Rob must always use --disable-dyndrivers because get-drv-info does not
work on his system. Rafael now has some diagnostic output to play with. This
is the only PLplot Mac OS X issue left where we feel there is something we
might be able to do about the situation.

* Rob must use -dev xwin -drvopt defvis to work around X server problems on
Mac OS X.

* For the default shared libraries, C, C++, and python worked without
problems. Rob did not try java, tcl/tk, or octave.

* Rob had to --disable-f77 for the default shared libraries because of a
limitation of the Mac OS X loader; apparently it cannot handle fortran
common blocks (which our fortran interface code uses) for shared libraries.
The combination of --enable-f77 --disable-shared does work for Rob. However,
disable-shared does have the side effect of large executables, and it also
disallows use of our python, java, and octave interfaces (all of which
depend on shared libraries).
_______________________________________________

Here is a summary of the current PLplot status on Cygwin.  (For Mac OS X
results see above.)

* When Ullal ran ./configure with lots of options from inside a script there
appeared to be some problems with the Cygwin shell (whether ash or bash). He
is still investigating this problem, but for now using ./configure from the
command line seems to work.

* Ullah so far has investigated only the case of --disable-shared
--disable-dyndrivers.  This necessarily eliminates the python, java, and
octave interfaces to PLplot which depend on shared libraries.  Thus, if you
are interested in any of these languages on Cygwin it would be well
worthwhile to at least attempt the default --enable-shared.  (Probably in
such an attempt you should continue with --disable-dyndrivers.)

* It appears that Cygwin Tcl has been limited to the cross-platform subset
Tcl code with the Unix Tcl extensions not available for this Unix platform.
(!) Since PLplot requires the Tcl Unix extensions, you must --disable-tcl on
Cygwin.

* Ullal finds the c, c++, and fortran interfaces to PLplot (for the static
libraries no dynamic drivers case) all work fine.  He has interactively
generated pbm, png, jpeg, xfig, plmeta, ps, and psc files and displayed
them with the appropriate applications (including plrender to display the
metafile format of the plmeta result).  The xterm device apparently does
not work for Ullal, although he hasn't clarified whether he actually ran
that from an xterm GUI (which is, of course, a requirement).
_______________________________________________

In sum, Debian stable, Mac OS X and Cygwin are all looking pretty good for
the current, experimental PLplot tarball, and my thanks to Rob and Ullah for
all the hard, repetitive testing work they put in to help achieve this good
result.

I encourage you to try out the current experimental PLplot tarball on other
platforms as well (or on Mac OS X or Cygwin platforms for even more
extensive testing or just plain use) _if_ you are willing to make your own
judgement on the security risk mentioned above.

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 PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org), the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net), the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net), and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________



----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Rafael