Re: [Plplot-devel] tk driver

[Vince D. <vi...@sa...>]

On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Geoffrey Furnish wrote:
> Vince Darley writes:
>  > Can the current plplot be compiled as one or more Tcl extensions on Unix?
>  > (i.e. so 'package require plplot' does something useful in a standard Tk
>  > shell)?  If so, then at least integrating the first two items below should
>  > be relatively easy.
> No one has done TEA yet (on the main branch), if that's what you're
> asking.

That's not exactly what I was asking, but I think you've answered the
question anyway.  There are many parts to TEA: a particular way of
building, the use of Tcl/Tk's 'stubs' tables, etc.

> The details are foggy in my brain at this point.  I remember looking
> in some detail at the TEA branch a year or so ago, and being concerned
> about some aspect of how the TEA branch interacted with device
> selection.  I remember there was discussion about it at the time, and
> I remember being personally convinced that a better solution was
> possible, but by now it has been so long since the discussion that I
> cannot remember the details of the problem or of the discussed
> solutions.  

I must say I don't remember anything about device selection, but this was
a long time ago...

> I have some TEA work ahead of me in my day job, so it is possible that
> I will become engrossed in the whole thing sometime this summer/fall,
> but it hasn't percolated to "top priority" quite yet.
> 
> BTW, you are welcome to selectively integrate things from your list
> below, into the main branch yourself, if you wish.  IMHO, part of the
> problem with the TEA branch is that too much happened on it.
> Reviewing the changes between TEA and main, is too big a task.  If
> the first two items depend on the TEA integration, perhaps you could
> just take the bottom three, and move that out of the TEA branch and
> into main (assuming they are suitably mature for production use by the
> wide world of PLplot folk).

I've uploaded a patch to sourceforge which contains the first set of
changes needed to cvs head.  Assuming that doesn't break anything, then
that patch, plus a few new files, will allow a first build of plplot
against Windows Tk.

I'd appreciate it if someone could check whether that patch breaks
anything (note: the patch has windows eols (\r\n) so care is needed to
apply it correctly on Unix).

> I'm a big fan of named branches, for focused work.  But if the TEA
> branch has roughly 5 major tasks all within it, I think that results,
> on a purely human level, in an impediment to getting it merged.
> Especially if the merge is left to others than the developer(s) on the
> branch.  It seems to me that perhaps some of this could've been done
> directly on main, or that perhaps a few named branches, each with more
> limited scope, could've been employed.

It really has two major tasks in it: new build technique, and addition of
support for Tk cross platform.  In my mind the latter is far more
important than the former.

cheers,

Vince.