[Plplot-devel] octave now configured with autotools

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

I have just committed some changes that should make octave work at least
for some of the examples.

I tested octave with the installed
prefix/lib/plplot5.1.0/examples/plplot-test.sh script.

The early "p" examples work well, but p7.m and p15.m have problems.
Apparently, the p7.m problem is a long-standing one from comments in
test_octave.sh, but the p15.m problem may be new.

Also, I could not get any of the x??.m examples to work with that script. It
only segfaults.  I presume plplot/test/test_octave.sh (which gets installed
in prefix/lib/plplot5.1.0/examples/) needs to be adjusted to some change that
has been made.

After the early p examples worked, but the x examples segfaulted, I went
back and looked at what was done before.  Apparently there is a sed step to
replace PLPLOT_OCTAVE_PATH with the appropriate value in
plplot_octave_path.m (see below).  I did that step by hand, but it didn't
change either the early p examples working or x examples segfaulting.  So I
think I have gone as far as I can go with this, and it is now up to Joao to
smooth out these rough spots.

Joao, I will be happy to answer any of your questions about what I did to
configure octave with autotools.  But the overall changes that I did to
(mostly) finish octave configuration were to create Makefile.am files (with
appropriate automake information) in the directory tree under
bindings/octave. automake takes care of the rest.  BTW, to do the equivalent
of the sed substitution mentioned above in PLplot, I would suggest simply
renaming plplot_octave_path.m as plplot_octave_path.m.in, putting an @xxx@
variable in the file, and changing configure.ac to configure xxx to whatever
path you want.  Alternatively, you could stick with the sed method for
editing plplot_octave_path.m.in to plplot_octave_path.m that automake will
automatically install. You can stick that rule right in PLplot/Makefile.am,
if you like. It is up to you which method you choose.

Tomorrow, I plan to start working on the static devices.  I don't think that
is going to take long at all. Rafael got them working earlier with the
libtools convenience library approach, and I only plan a slight modification
of his approach so that it doesn't clobber the dynamic driver approach.
After that work is done, I will probably work on java.  That's really a low
priority (since the API is so incomplete), and in fact I was planning to
disable java for the release, but I have essentially run out of things to do
before the release except cheer you guys on to sort out the remaining
rough spots for PLplot.

Currently, those rough spots consist of the -dev tk problem and the above
octave problems. Also, we need lots of testing of this new configuration
system both on Linux and also on other Unix platforms to find any other
rough spots.  But that is about it....

Alan

email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902	FAX: 250-721-7715
snail-mail:
Dr. Alan W. Irwin
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055,
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6
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