Re: [Plplot-devel] Prescriptions for running tkdemos.tcl under wish and tcldemos.tcl under tclsh

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

On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Maurice LeBrun wrote:

> Try again now, with fixes under cf/.

OK.  Used clean start (rm -rf /usr/local/plplot/*; make clean + inspection
of plplot/tmp to make sure it really worked; cvs update; make configure;
configure; make; make install).  Copied the installed examples to
/tmp/examples (note this is an absolute location and nothing to do with
plplot/tmp).

With some limitations to be discussed below -dev tk worked fine as well as
tcldemos.tcl, tkdemos.tcl, and runAllDemos.tcl under the appropriate recipes
published yesterday. Thanks, Maurice, for going "above and beyond" on this
one during a time when you expected to be free of PLplot.

Here are some current limitations of the tcl/tk PLplot install I would like
to see removed in the long term.

(1) Must have /usr/local/plplot/bin in PATH in order for -dev tk to work. tk
is the only device with this requirement.  As I understand it, this
requirement is needed because the tk device starts its own instance of
plserver, and it needs to be able to find it.  Doesn't the PLplot library
already know where everything is (for both the plplot/tmp location and
installed location) so it could find plserver without having to rely on the
PATH?  Obviously you need the PATH set if you are doing lots of plrendering
or plserving.  But there are many cases of using PLplot where you just
simply want to use -dev tk with, e.g, the python examples or C examples so
it would be nice to remove this limitation of requiring the PATH to be set
for -dev tk.

(2) As reported yesterday, I could not get tcldemos.tcl to work under tclsh
without setting PL_LIBRARY to /usr/local/plplot/lib/plplot5.1.0/tcl.  I
presume this is also a requirement for running tkdemos.tcl under wish
and runAllDemos.tcl under wish.  But should it be?  Under tclsh and
wish I already execute

lappend auto_path /usr/local/plplot/lib/plplot5.1.0

Thus, shouldn't we be able to find the location of everything internally by
scanning through the directories in auto_path?  We have been through so many
variations of the tcl/tk install that I cannot remember clearly any more,
but I believe there were some variations on the theme that did not require
setting PL_LIBRARY, and I hope we can get back to that.

Alan