Re: [Plplot-general] PLplot 5.6.1 Release Candidate 1

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

On 2006-05-21 14:00-0400 hba...@ma... wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> Release candidate #1 for PLplot 5.6.1 is now available for download at:
>
> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2915
>
> This is a *test* release for the final version of PLplot 5.6.1. If you have 
> the time & the inclination, please download it and let us know if does/does 
> not work on your system of choice.

Thanks, Hazen.

Your new release candidate tarball, plplot-5.6.1_RC1.tar.gz, works for me.

I will describe some details for the benefit of PLplot users that want
to give this a try.

My Ubuntu Breezy system has been loaded up with all the development packages
(e.g., Tcl, free java, octave, gfortran) required to take advantage of
virtually all language interfaces and device drivers of PLplot that are
accessible from Linux.  The build and install was accomplished as follows:

./configure --prefix=$PREFIX --disable-static --enable-f95 F77=f95 \
--with-prebuiltdoc >& configure.out
make >& make.out
make install >& make_install.out

PREFIX is my chosen install prefix (/usr/local/plplot in my case). If you
--enable-f95, F77 must be set to whatever is appropriate for your fortran 95
compiler which was f95 in my particular case.  Although not necessary in my
case, you might also have to set FFLAGS to to whatever is appropriate for
FCFLAGS.  These --enable-f95 workarounds should not be necessary when we can
base our release on libtool-2.0 (scheduled for release later this year). The
--with-prebuiltdoc option allows me to browse the new documentation
(including the initial cut at some fortran 95 documentation) at 
$PREFIX/share/doc/plplot/html/index.html.

After the build and install I did the usual test of compiling the installed
examples and testing them:

cp -a $prefix/share/plplot5.6.1_RC1/examples/ /tmp/examples
cd /tmp/examples
make
./plplot-test.sh script

Spot checks of the resulting 162 (!) postscript files looked good, and a
comprehensive check showed these postscript results were identical with
previous ones.

So 5.6.1 release candidate 1 is looking good on Ubuntu Breezy, and I
strongly encourage RC1 reports from our users (going through all the steps
above) to make sure 5.6.1 gets comprehensively tested on as wide a variety
of platforms as possible before it is released in final form.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

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

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); 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
__________________________