Re: [Plplot-general] Build documentation

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

On 2013-11-15 10:13+0100 Alexis Praga wrote:

> Hi Alan,
>
> I successfully built and installed the latest SVN (revision 12702). As a 
> reference,
> I have include the output of plplot-test.sh in share/examples, which looks OK
> to me (only warnings).
> Also, I consider it verbose enough for a normal install, even though the 
> verbosity
> would be more interesting had the build/install failed.
>
> Finally, this version was validated by an install of PerlDL (and all of its 
> testing
> suite) and some plotting I did with it.

Hi Alexis:

I agree that the plplot-test.sh.out results are OK (and will be
considerably cleaned up if you install development packages for
shapelib and qhull. I assume official rpms of those are available on
Fedora.) If you want to do even more extensive testing of PLplot, run

make VERBOSE=1 -j4 test_noninteractive >& test_noninteractive.out

and

make VERBOSE=1 -j4 test_interactive >& test_interactive.out

in the build tree and also after you run "make install", run those
same targets for the separate CMake-based build system that we install
along with the installed examples.  You configure that separate build
system by running cmake pointing to the installed examples top-level
source-tree directory at $prefix/share/plplot$version/examples. Be
sure to run that from a separate build tree so it does not interfere
with another separate build system for the installed examples that is
based on Makefiles and pkg-config.  But that traditional build system
is not as powerful as the CMake-based one.

The above non-interactive tests will generate something roughly like
3GB of plot files, and the above interactive tests will produce many
plots on your screen (mostly in non-pause mode so you don't have to
hit the enter key that much to keep them moving along).  Of course, it
is essential to capture the VERBOSE=1 results in the above *.out files
in case there are any errors.

Your good results for the current svn trunk version are not only good
news from your perspective but also from our perspective since we plan
to do a release of PLplot fairly soon (near the end of the year) based
on the svn trunk version.  No more two-year waits between PLplot
releases! I can say that because that unprecedented delay between
5.9.9 and 5.9.10 was caused by our extensive search for a release
manager volunteer who finally turned out (much to my surprise) to be
me.  :-) I am really looking forward to releasing 5.9.11 soon since
svn trunk is looking pretty good.  Also, that release should be much
easier for me than the release of 5.9.10 due to my gained experience
and the much shorter release cycle.

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); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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