Re: [Plplot-general] New CVS distribution available

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

On 2003-12-26 17:48+0100 Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

> A new CVS snapshot distribution tarball for PLplot is available at the usual
> place:
>
>     http://people.debian.org/~rafael/plplot.html
>
> The tarball name is plplot-5.2.1.cvs.20031226.tar.gz. It was generated in a
> Debian unstable system with the following versions of the GNU autotools:
>
>     Autoconf  2.58
>     Automake  1.7.9
>      Libtool  1.5.0a
>
> Several changes and bug fixes since the last cvs distribution tarball
> (tagged 20031030) are included, but I think that the two most important
> improvements are the extension of the Fortran bindings API (done by Alan),
> and the inclusion of demos for the Perl/PDL bindings.

Those on plplot_devel are already aware of the fortran status, but I should
summarize it here as well:

I have recently done a lot of work to extend the fortran interface (29
additional functions now available) and examples for PLplot.  The changed
interface and examples build on Linux with the default double precision, and
the result is the first 7 standard examples for fortran give near identical
results to the corresponding C examples.  But I plan considerable additional
work in the next week or so to extend both the fortran interface and
examples to the point where they can mimic the complete standard set of C
(and tcl, python, java, octave, and yorick [yplot]) examples. Also, I plan
to make fortran work again with the single-precision form of the PLplot
library (i.e., the --without-double option), and there is still some
configuration work to do to help fortran work on other platforms than Linux.

So _from the fortran perspective_, this particular snapshot works for
Linux, but I doubt it will work on other platforms yet, and even on Linux it
is a work in progress.

In contrast to fortran, the non-fortran parts of PLplot should be fine
cross-platform except possibly for a configure issue one Mac OS X 10.3 user
has reported which still needs confirmation.  Also, this cvs version is
quite stable for developers and includes many bug fixes relative to the
5.2.1 version.  So I agree with Rafael that for the non-fortran parts this
cvs snapshot is of near release-candidate quality.

Also, I want to publically thank Rafael for his work on the PDL examples and
in generating this tarball after a long hiatus caused by the debian.org
intrusion.  It is great to see the plplot cvs snapshot tarballs back at
http://people.debian.org/~rafael/plplot.html!

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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