Re: [Plplot-devel] Deprecation of the MinGW/MSYS platform

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

Hi Alan,



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alan W. Irwin [mailto:ir...@be...]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2016 9:26 PM
> To: Arjen Markus
> Cc: PLplot development list
> Subject: RE: [Plplot-devel] Deprecation of the MinGW/MSYS platform
>
> Hi Arjen:
>
> Sorry, I did not state what I meant very clearly. There is no doubt that distributions
> of free software such as Cygwin and MinGW-w64/MSYS2 provide free libraries that
> are soft dependencies of PLplot such as the pthread, shapelib, and qhull libraries;
> the Qt4 suite of libraries, the Pango/Cairo subset of the GTK+ suite of libraries,
> wxWidgets, etc.


Oh, I was not even thinking about these - I just saw the dependency and found it curious - it reminded me of Cygwin's DLLs. But the security issue is definitely an issue and more important than avoiding a single dependency somewhere.

>
> Therefore, I feel the proper way to deal with the inherent security issues for binary
> distribution is to let official distributions of free software handle that headache.  So I
> am pleased that Orion is packaging PLplot for Fedora, Andrew is doing the same
> thing on Debian (and indirectly on Debian derivatives such as Ubuntu).  Similarly,
> there are PLplot packaging efforts on most other Linux distributions, the principal
> Mac OS X distributions Fink, MacPorts, and Homebrew, and also the principal
> *BSD variants, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.
>
> In contrast to that situation, my understanding is that both the Cygwin and MinGW-
> w64/MSYS2 platforms do not currently distribute PLplot.  To fix those important
> issues we need someone with access to those two platforms to become a packager
> for each of them.  Would you be willing to take on those two additional important
> roles?  I think that would be a time-consuming effort to start for you, but after that
> required initial burst of activity, I don't think it would take a major effort to maintain
> the Cygwin and MinGW-w64/MSYS2 packages for PLplot going forward.
>
> If it turns out you are interested in becoming the PLplot packager for either/both
> those distributions, I think the next steps would be to query the Cygwin and MSYS2
> mailing lists to find out exact details of how to become a packager of PLplot for
> those two distributions.
>


Getting PLplot into the collections of packages managed by Cygwin and MSYS2 definitely seems worthwhile and would solve a problem that we have discussed every so often over the years. I have no idea though what amount of time is to be invested and what kind of work it involves. I can find out though - I happen to know a contributor ;).

Regards,

Arjen

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