Re: [Plplot-general] plplot and mac os x

[Alan W. I. <ai...@us...>]

On 2003-12-25 13:00-0500 Koen van der Drift wrote:

> On Dec 24, 2003, at 1:28 PM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>
> > Python:
> >
> > PY_VERSION=`python -c 'import sys ; print sys.version[0:3]'`
> > export PYTHON_INC_DIR=/usr/include/python${PY_VERSION}/
> >
> > The first command is just a trick to get the python version that is
> > normally
> > part of the include directory name, but if you know your python
> > version in
> > advance it won't be necessary.  The export command is the important
> > one.
> > Adjust that line (including the correct version number for your default
> > python) to wherever your python headers are located.
>
> Thanks for the input. From previous postings on Mac OSX and plplot I
> understand that I need to use --disable-shared.

That's only needed (as a temporary workaround) for the fortran case.  Also,
dynamic drivers don't work for all cases (we still haven't come up with a
fix for that bug) so you must always specify --disable-dyndrivers.  However,
if you specify --disable-f77 --disable-dyndrivers (and use the default
--enable-shared), shared libraries and python apparently (see discussions in
September on plplot-devel) work well.  Note, some patches had to be applied
to PLplot-5.2.1 to get that to work smoothly for old (10.1?) Mac OS X, but
the latest PLplot cvs does not work with Mac OS X 10.3 (still no fix for
that bug as well).

I am sorry everything is in a bit of disarray with Mac OS X and PLplot, but
we all three of Mac OS X, autotools, and PLplot are rapidly moving targets.
Also, bug fixing is slow because no PLplot developer has direct Mac OS X
access, and we must rely on indirect actions of users to help us debug for
that platform as a consequence.

> Besides python, X11 and tcltk, are there any other packages needed for
> plplot?

In actual truth none of the above are needed.  For example, if all the above
are disabled, you could (theoretically, I haven't tried this myself) still
run any of the C examples from the command line using -dev psc (our coloured
postscript device) or -dev ps (our gray-scale postscript device) and send
the file results directly to a printer without X, tcl/tk, or python being
installed on your system.

What is going on is the configure script has essentially every language
interface for PLplot and every device driver enabled by default. You can
turn off any of those with the --disable options, (run ./configure --help to
look at all options) and it will carry on with the subset of PLplot that you
have specified.  If configure cannot find needed system resources it will
disable even more options itself (with a warning message) and carry on.  So
if you want everything, look for those warning messages from configure and
install the appropriate development package. But you can choose to ignore
those warning messages, and the remaining subset of PLplot should work fine.

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).
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Linux-powered Science
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