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

[Maurice L. <mj...@ga...>]

Alan W. Irwin writes:
 > 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.

I agree, the tk driver should consider other places than just the existing
path.  In fact I now think the path should be checked last (if at all), with
the search order going as:
 - the current dir, *if* it looks like a plplot build (tmp) dir
   (not sure how to check that but it should be possible)
 - the install dir
 - existing path

Will put it on my to-do list, shouldn't be that much work (famous last words)
but might require some thought.

 > (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.

I don't know what you mean here.  Could you write out the steps that generate
the error so I can look at it?

-- 
Maurice LeBrun    mj...@ga...
Research Organization for Information Science and Technology of Japan (RIST)