[Plplot-general] Freeze and release dates now much better determined + call for comprehensive testing

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

The freeze deadline is now chiselled in stone as December 17th, 3 days
from now. That deadline is just the end date for intrusive fixes for
this release, but as far as I know nobody is planning any more of those.
Of course, you should expect small bug fixes and large or small
documentation updates to continue through to the day of the release
which might be only December 22 (if our further comprehensive testing
doesn't turn up any release critical issues), or December 27th (if
there are some release-critical issues to address).

I personally have already finished my comprehensive testing with
completely satisfactory results on Debian Jessie with both CMake-3.0.2
and CMake-3.7.0 (see
<https://sourceforge.net/p/plplot/wiki/Testing_PLplot/#Testing%20Reports>).
So I am happy with the quality of what is going to become 5.12.0 right
now although more comprehensive test reports from you guys would be
appreciated to confirm that.

Note, the recommended way to do such testing now is

time (nice -19 scripts/comprehensive_test.sh --do_submit_dashboard yes --do_test_interactive no)

--do_test_interactive no makes your life much easier.

--do_submit_dashboard yes is optional.  It submits a dashboard
consisting of the ctest subset of the results to
<http://my.cdash.org/index.php?project=PLplot_git> to be displayed in
quite nice format without violating your privacy.  If nobody has
submitted a dashboard on the day you try this, and you would like to see
what they look like before submitting one yourself, there should
always be some good dashboard results on today's date, 2016-12-14, for
you to look at.

nice -19 allows your computer to be usable during this long test
(typically a couple of hours if the interactive part is turned off
like above).

time () provides a nice time summary of how long it took at the end.

The above comprehensive test creates a tarball (stored in
../comprehensive_test_disposable/comprehensive.tar.gz) report
collecting all sorts of information about the test such as what
environment variables you set that are relevant to the test, a
complete listing of the files that were created by the test,
CMakeCache.txt files, and lots of output results from various cmake
and make invocations made during the comprehensive testing.  Please
look at the contents of that tarball to satisfy yourself there is
nothing there that violates your privacy.  Then follow up by sending
me that tarball to help me diagnose what went wrong and help you to
avoid it if the script did not complete or else post a summary of your
comprehensive test report at 
<https://sourceforge.net/p/plplot/wiki/Testing_PLplot/#Testing%20Reports>
with your permission when the script does complete (with a summary of
whatever components of PLplot you had to drop to obtain that desired
completion on your particular platform).

Note on Debian Jessie I got through the entire test with no such
issues at all, but other Linux platforms, and especially Windows and
Mac OS X platforms might not be as kind to you.  But that is the point
of the above reports; to find out the platform limitations of the
forthcoming PLplot-5.12.0 release, and your help in establishing those
limits on the platforms that are accessible to you would be much
appreciated.

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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