[Plplot-devel] PLplot on Debian Buster looking fairly good so far

[Alan W. I. <Ala...@gm...>]

It's a long story involving a new graphics card that I by mistake
bought for my new computer.  That card is only (partially) supported
by the cutting-edge Linux graphics stack so the upshot is I have
decided to run Debian Buster on my (new) principal computer that I use
for PLplot testing.  Buster is a constantly changing rolling release
that stays fairly close (but likely not quite as close as Fedora and
MinGW-w64/MSYS2) to the cutting edge of free software packages.  So
this is a huge change compared to my previous testing environment
(Debian Jessie) which was at least 3 years away from the cutting edge.
So by using this Debian Buster test environment I should be some help
to Orion (Fedora) and Arjen (MinGW-w64/MSYS2) in changing PLplot so it
will work properly with cutting-edge free software.

Commit 994723471 contains the first tranche of fixes that get PLplot
more-or-less working on Debian Buster (including perfect results for
Ada, see my previous post to this list).  See the associated commit
message for all the details of what was changed, what was tested, and
any remaining regressions in the configuration and test results.

I want to get all these regressions fixed before the next PLplot
release so that means it will likely be several more months before I
can even start to plan that release.  So this period continues to be
an excellent opportunity for the rest of the PLplot developers to
pursue the development topics that interest them.

Alan
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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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