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

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

On 2006-05-22 00:06+0200 steven mestdagh wrote:

> With 5.6.0, I had some problems with the pstex driver.
>
> I get a SIGSEGV (on OpenBSD), which can be prevented by the following
> patch. However, the resulting .eps_t file does not contain any label text.
> So maybe there is a better fix?
>
> steven
>
> --- drivers/pstex.c.orig	Mon Jan 19 20:10:19 2004
> +++ drivers/pstex.c	Mon Apr 17 01:34:40 2006
> @@ -260,6 +261,11 @@ parse_str(const char *str, char *dest)
> 		       "psi", "Psi", "omega", "Omega"};
>
>   plgesc(&esc);
> +
> +  if (str == NULL) {
> +    *tp = '\0';
> +    return;
> +  }
>
>   while (*str) {
>

I confirm segfaults on both Debian Stable and Ubuntu Breezy as well.  So it
appears some bit rot has set in.

There was an overview of the purpose of the pstex device driver in 2001 list
mail which indicated it was designed to short-circuit the process of using
-dev xfig, importing the result to xfig, and exporting the result to latex.
But I am not sure that short-circuit is of much utility any more since the
only purpose of the short-circuit, as far as I know, was to get access to
some Type 1 fonts.  Other than a spattering of 2001 list mail (which is no
longer available to anybody unless they saved it at the time), the pstex
device driver is undocumented.

Those nice-looking fonts did impress me in 2001, but we have long since had
those completely supported in the ps device driver, and now we have
introduced powerful new Complex Text Layout (CTL) and TrueType font
capability with the psttf device driver. Also, it is completely
straightforward to import either ps or psttf results into latex documents.

Thus, I am largely convinced the pstex device is not worth supporting any
more especially since nobody else has responded to this bug report or my
off-list question to other PLplot core developers about this device. So
unless someone surprises me in the next 24 hours and volunteers to support
this device, I have decided to completely disable its build on Unix systems
for 5.6.1 while keeping the pstex.c code still available in CVS and the
distribution tarball.  This change should allow anybody who is still keen on
pstex to fix that code in the future while discouraging anybody from
attempting to build it when we know it segfaults.

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).
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Linux-powered Science
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