Re: [Plplot-devel] PLplot Debian package

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

On 2017-07-15 20:49+0200 Ole Streicher wrote:

> Hi Alan,
>
> On 15.07.2017 20:37, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> Sometimes our bindings libraries have the same core name (e.g.,
>> wxwidgets, qt) as the device driver, but bindings libraries and
>> device drivers are completely different and there is no chance of a
>> nameclash between them.  So there should be no issue of concern in
>> this case.
>
> My question here is mainly if they should reside in the same package. As
> far as I understand you, they should go into separate packages.

To explain further we have three major configuration modes

1. The default (-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON, -DENABLE_DYNDRIVERS=ON) which
builds shared PLplot libraries and dynamically
loaded (separate) devices.

2. Shared PLplot libraries (-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON) and nondynamic devices (-DENABLE_DYNDRIVERS=OFF)
where the C and C++ device driver
code is made part of our core library.

3. Static PLplot libraries (-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF which forces
-DENABLE_DYNDRIVERS=OFF)

We continue to maintain 2 for historical reasons, and probably the
same could be said of 3.  But from your question I assume you are using
1.

Furthermore, your question inspired me to look at the
-DDEFAULT_NO_DEVICES=ON case (for 1 although case 2 and 3 should give
similar results).  For that case (and assuming you do not specify any
devices to build which is what I did) the library and examples build
without issues, but they are useless.  Here is an example of what
happens:

software@raven> examples/c/x00c

*** PLPLOT ERROR, IMMEDIATE EXIT ***
No device drivers found - please check the environment variable
PLPLOT_DRV_DIR
Program aborted

So it is your call as packager, but you should be aware for case 1 if
you do split up the library and dynamic devices, and a user installs
only the library, that library will be essentially useless.

Of course, I just noticed the above warning message when no device
drivers are installed is pretty useless/misleading, but I don't want
to deal with that now so if someone wants to send a patch....

> Another small question: We maintain some metadata about our packages,
> and one of the entries is the preferred citation. Is there a paper that
> should serve as a reference for plplot?

There is
<http://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgabe/1996/12/Plplot/plplot.html>, but
that link is now broken, the linux magazin search function cannot find
it, I never understood that article because it was written in German,
and by now it would be completely out of date in any case. Note to
self: remove that link from our documentation.

Another slightly better possibility (but still bad) is users have
created the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLplot,
but that is already quite dated (e.g., it refers to our subversion
repository!) and is seriously incomplete, i.e., it simply copies a
small subset of an extremely dated copy of the plplot.sourceforge.net website
which I assume your metadata already refers to as our home page.

So I think the best answer to your question in the short term is no,
you should leave the "preferred citation" metadata empty.

But in the long-term I think it is important for one of the PLplot
developers or heavily interested users to write up PLplot in an
accessible article simply to give some much-needed publicity to this
quite useful plotting solution.  Any volunteers?

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).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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