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

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

Thanks, Orion, for your report.  Comments in context below....Alan

On 2006-05-22 11:39-0600 Orion Poplawski wrote:

> Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> 
>> 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. 
>
>  Compiling on Fedora Core Development I do not appear to need to specify 
> F77=f95.  What problems did you see when you omitted it?  I don't see the 
> extra "yes" after the "accepts -g" check, and no obvious errors.

Generally, we have found you must specify F77=f95 (or whatever is
appropriate for your fortran 95 compiler) if there is a fortran 77 compiler
installed.  The explanation I got on the libtool list was fortran 77
compilers tended to mess up the fortran 95 settings so setting F77 cuts the
fortran 77 compiler completely out of the loop to get around this. So we
have just gotten in the habit of setting F77. But that proved necessary on
most platforms for a slightly different version of our fortran configuration
that has been changed since so it is possible this problem has been fixed
and setting F77 is no longer required.

Since Orion's platform did not need the F77 setting, I ask anybody else who
tests this to let me know whether setting F77 is absolutely necessary
anymore on any platform.  If this workaround were no longer necessary on any
platform, that would be excellent news.

>
>> 
>> 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.
>
> Most of them look good, except:
>
> Testing front-end python
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "/builddir/build/BUILD/plplot-5.6.1_RC1/test/../examples/python/x03", 
> line 36, in
> ?
>    import xw03
>  File "/builddir/build/BUILD/plplot-5.6.1_RC1/examples/python/xw03.py", line 
> 63, in ?
>    main()
>  File "/builddir/build/BUILD/plplot-5.6.1_RC1/examples/python/xw03.py", line 
> 21, in main
>    i.shape = (-1,1)
> ValueError: can only specify one unknown dimension
>
> Seen in xw03.py, 08, 09, 11, 15, 16, 18, 22

You are the first to report this problem.  The python examples certainly
work on my two systems (Ubuntu Breezy with Python 2.4.2/Numeric-23.8 and
Debian stable with Python 2.3.5/Numeric-23.8). What is your version of
Python _and_ Numeric?  Fedora is notoriously cutting edge so is it possible
you are using one of the Numeric successors such as Numarray or NumPy? The
NumPy project advertises themselves (see
http://numeric.scipy.org/#older_array) as the ultimate successor to Numeric
and Numarray, but I don't know how much they have convinced others of this.
At some point I may move us to NumPy, but I really haven't had time to
investigate whether NumPy has good distribution support.  For now, I know
Numeric does have that support (with the possible exception of Fedora), so
that is why I am sticking with Numeric for now.

>
> Also, I still got:
>
> PASS: plplot-test.sh
> ==================
> All 1 tests passed
> ==================
>
> even with the above errors.

That is not right.  However, I don't maintain the complicated make check
logic myself (the installed examples test I advocate above has much simpler
logic behind it) so somebody else will have to do the fix.

>
>
> Finally, I guess I should have weighed in earlier on the debate about where 
> to put the fortran .mod files earlier, but I'm not sure I'm happy about 
> /usr/lib/fortran/modules/plplot.  Why so many subdirs?  Why not just 
> /usr/lib/plplot?  The former makes for more work for distribution makers (who 
> owns /usr/lib/fortran?).

At this point, I don't think the Linux community has really come to grips
with this fortran 95 install location issue since it is only recently that
libre fortran 95 compilers (gfortran and g95) became viable solutions. The
fortran part of the above install location was recommended in a generic way
by someone on the Linux File Hierarchy Standards list, but that is certainly
not an official decision and they may change their minds later. The modules
part of it was my invention to be more informative, but if that turns out to
be a major problem we can certainly move to /usr/lib/fortran/plplot in the
future or anything else that finally becomes officially recommended by the
LFHS group.  For now, though, I think we should just stick with what we
have.

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
__________________________