Re: [Plplot-general] Trying to build examples

[Arjen M. <Arj...@de...>]

Hi Alan, Steven,



>
> Good post, Steve!  I certainly agree that someone with Arnaud's distribution needs
> should evaluate PLplot to figure out the minimalist components of it that they need
> (since disabling unused components makes their distribution life much easier).  Such
> component disabling is well supported by our current build system, but we likely
> need to document that better in our wiki.  In response to your last point, we do
> provide two systems (make+pkg-config and CMake) for building our examples. They
> both do an awful lot now that is important (such as implementing tests of the results),
> but that complexity is likely confusing to the first-time user so we also need to
> document in our wiki a minimalist example or two of how to use both those
> approaches to build an app that links to PLplot.
>


I did an experiment with a threaded example (to try and reproduce a problem Sergei Naumov reported) and for building that I simply used a command-line like:

gcc -c example.c -I...all the appropriate include directories

gcc -o example example.o -L.../dll -lplplot -lcsirocsa -lqsastime

under Cygwin. It worked splendidly, with the exception that it does not reproduce the faulty behaviour, but that is a detail. The reason I bring this up is that we may need the machinery of CMake to build the entire library with its - mainly optional - external components and various language bindings, but once that is done, building a program that uses PLplot is surprisingly simple. The documentation should include a section on this - we focus so much on getting PLplot build that we forget about the next step :).

As for having to rely on external libraries: on Windows the run-time libraries for any program may cause some hassle (suppressing a sigh) - not everything can be done statically!

Regards,

Arjen





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