Re: [Plplot-general] Trying to build examples

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

On 2015-01-22 10:35+0100 Arnaud Darmont wrote:

> We are not going to deploy anything like this on our customer's
machines. It has to run in a windows install without any specific
external requirements.

Umm. The whole point of static linking is to avoid external
requirements.

> I will look for another plotting library. It will be less work.

It sounds like you have made up your mind so good luck with that.

For others reading this thread now or in the future, it is not quite
that simple. I think every good plotting package worth its salt has
external libraries it depends on so the static linking method I
described earlier in this thread must be used to avoid deployment
issues.  So Arnaud's real complaint against PLplot is he would have to
figure out how to statically link PLplot against static external
libraries with some of that work requiring CMake investigation. And
that is certainly a valid complaint.

Therefore, it would likely be a good idea for us to do at least part
of that work ourselves in the future, i.e., do the experiments with
CMake to figure out how to compel use of static external libraries,
and publish a script and/or put clear directions on our Wiki so
someone like Arnaud could just routinely follow those directions and
be done with no further investigation required on his part.

Another alternative would be for us to distribute a binary static
version of PLplot linked in the manner I have described on our own.
But I don't advocate that exact alternative because distributors of
binary versions of other's free software have certain responsibilities
(i.e., to publish [not just link to] exact source code for other's
free software that you have included in the binary distribution).
That's certainly doable (after all every official binary distribution
of free software does that), but it takes work to package up all that
source code for Qt5, Pango/Cairo, wxwidgets, etc. Instead, what we
should do is figure out a way to package up our software (both in
static and shared form) as an official part of the Cygwin distribution
and the MinGW-w64/MSYS distribution.  Such official binary
distributions automatically satisfy the source code distribution
requirement I have mentioned.

So in sum, with a lot of additional work on our part we would be in a
position to tell somone with Arnaud's deployment needs to follow the
Wiki directions, run the equivalent script, or link to the static
version of PLplot in one of those distributions.

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).
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Linux-powered Science
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