Re: [Plplot-general] unable to load wxwidgets driver

[Joe C. <ch...@tr...>]

Werner Smekal wrote:
> Hi Joe,
> 
> shared plplot library:
> you can try the following: set the install directory other than /usr/local. 
> (configure --prefix=/home/user/plplot_local) than you know exactly what files 
> plplot installed and can even copy the whole directory. I would also suggest 
> to turn off all drivers you don't need - this would minimize the 
> dependencies. And you can do also the same for the wxwidgets library - 
> install it in a own directory (--prefix=wxGTK_local) and turn off everything 
> you don't need (--with-expat=false, etc).
> You get two directories which you can copy and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH 
> accordingly. Mind though, that this is not good practice - since 
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH is only for debugging purposes and not to use for installing 
> executables. Anyway, you could also use the same directory for wxwidgets and 
> plplot, so that everything is installed in the same directory and copy this 
> to the extrema distribution. Also, you can use the command ldd on an 
> executable or library, to find out, from which libraries it depends, and also 
> shows if this library is not available on the system. This shouls help you a 
> lot. It's also possible that you have the library, but the wrong version, 
> which also might not work.

I have already tried this, but just to be sure, I did it from scratch
again.  No luck.  The extrema program runs fine on my machine but when I 
copy it to another machine and try to use the surface plotting it comes
back with
	*** PLPLOT ERROR ***
	plInitDispatchTable: Could not open drivers directory, aborting
	operation.  Requested device wxwidgets not available
Interestingly, when I try ldd on extrema, the wxwidgets.so driver lib
is not listed ???

>> also works fine when wxWidgets is created statically, but I still have
>> to distribute a few .so files from the pango, cairo and gtk packages.
>> Anyway, everything works fine until I put PLplot into the mix.
> 
> pango, cairo and gtk should definitely not distributed. This is really not a 
> good idea, this libraries must be provided by the distribution, they are 
> really basic. Ask the user to install this packages before he tries to start 
> extrema.

I disagree.  So far, except for PLplot, extrema works fine with the .so
files that it needs put into a subdirectory of extrema, and the extrema
program is run from a shell script, which sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH to that
subdirectory before running the executable.  I don't want to force users
of extrema to install multiple packages that are peripheral to extrema.
Many users will not have root privilege anyway, so what other choice is
there?

>> If I could build PLplot with the wxwidgets driver as static libs, that
>> would be great.  If you can tell me how to do it, that would also be
>> great, and I would appreciate it enormously.  If I am simply missing
>> something obvious, please let me know.
> 
> Could you first try the shared library solution with the directories, ldd and 
> so on. If this doesn't work, than I write a short summary how to get the new 
> sources from cvs and build a static library.

I can't get the shared lib solution to work.  If there is a static
solution, I would be very grateful to be shown the details.

Joe Chuma
TRIUMF
Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics