Re: [Plplot-devel] Should line width thinner than 1.0 be supported?

[Hezekiah M. C. <hez...@us...>]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 5:23 AM, Andrew Ross
<and...@us...> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 06:31:42PM -0800, Alan Irwin wrote:
>>
>> Of course, we would still be stuck with integer line widths for the
>> pllegend, plshade, and plshades API until we changed those width
>> arguments to PLFLT.  But making such changes is tougher on our users
>> than the above 4 changes because we don't want to change the pllegend,
>> plshade, and plshades function names.  So we could put that change off
>> until later, but if we are going to do the above 4 changes, it is
>> probably a good time to do the pllegend, plshade, and plshades API
>> changes as well (so long as we warn our users about this in the
>> release announcement and do the appropriate SOVERSION bump to force
>> them to recompile their applications/libraries.) But I emphasize this
>> is a separate issue that should not affect what we decide to do for
>> plwid.
>
> I agree the pllegend, plshade(s) issues are a bit more thorny. One
> advantage of changing now is that we can fix plcolorbar at least before
> we finalise the API. In C at least old code should work, perhaps
> with a warning, as the int will be cast to a float. On stricter
> compilers this might require an explicit cast. For some languages
> where function arguments can be overloaded we can provide both
> versions for a while.
>

My vote goes to changing all of the impacted functions now.  With the
removal of plwid and addition of plwidth, leaving integer line widths
elsewhere in the API is an ugly inconsistency.  It is something I
expect we will want to change at some point so sooner - before another
release! - would be better than later.

Hez