[Plplot-devel] Fill issue

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

To Phil:

You said:

> 2) The fill bug where the whole plot gets accidentally filled - I
can't remember if that still exits or if a workaround fix was added.

Thanks for reminding me of that rather complex fill issue.  No fix has
been done yet so that issue
should still be with us.  I had already started to sort out some of the
preliminaries on a private topic branch, but I shut that down due to
lack of time leading up to 5.12.0, but I plan to restart that effort
early in this current (major) release cycle as promised back when I
had to shut it down. An additional constraint is we need lots of time
to test any solution to this issue to make sure we haven't turned a
fairly acceptable situation (only your two reports of fill issues for
rather special conditions over the many years since the fill code was
last changed) worse.  So ideally the definitive fill fix should be
implemented soon, but we should test it for a long time.  So my
initial plan is to leave this fill fix out of any quick bug fix
release (5.12.1) for wxwidgets fixes and other quick and simple fixes,
and only release this fill fix as part of the next major release
(5.13.0).

My first big priority (beyond some minor stuff) is the remaining Linux
inefficiency issues for wxwidgets, but very high on my priority list
after that comes restarting my fill branch and implementing a
definitive solution to the fill issue that is extremely well tested
and which we can all therefore trust.  By the way, one test I am
considering is for a rather complex and random fill pattern center a
small clip box in a random part of the space filled by that pattern.
Then make an animated GIF movie of the fill patterns that result as
that clip box is smoothly expanded.  The fills should mostly be
continuous as that clip box is expanded so I am pretty sure such a
movie would give the eye a chance to quickly evaluate whether our fill
algorithm is working properly for a given random pattern superimposed
on a clipping square of arbitrary size relative to the pattern. Then
move on to the next random fill pattern and run the test again, for
say 100 different random fill patterns.

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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