Re: [Plplot-devel] octave now configured with autotools

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

On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, [iso-8859-1] Jo=E3o Cardoso wrote:

> Regarding the examples directory problem: from other packages that use
> AT, a plain make installs thinks under the distribution tree, with
> libraries in .libs directories and executables that are linked with the
> libraries in the .libs dirs, but the real executables becomes hidden
> (in .libs? no, under .something) and in place of the executable (i.e.
> with the same name), is put a script that works as a wrapper to the
> real (hidden) executabl (e.g., seting up a LD_LIBRARY_PATH that founds
> libs in the .libs dirs).

>
> I'm sure you know all this, but I think that this setup will be fine for
> us, and avoids the need to install the all package after changing a
> single line in a source file, in order to run an example.

I hadn't actually thought about this before, but I believe you are right.
You might want to flesh out the idea a little more.  For example, there
might be a way to use the machinery of autotools support for tests so that
"make check" compiles all the plplot/examples/x??c programmes in place.
Subsequently, you could run any of those programmes interactively to test
out your change say to libplplot without going through the full install
process (or recompiling the examples since with shared libraries you can
rebuild the library without having to rebuild the application that uses the
library).

Several PLplot generations later we might want to make the tests more
complicated with comparison with test postscript results, but right now suc=
h
complications would make no sense since the tests would often fail due to
platform differences and poor internal precision of PLplot.  So if you
decide to go with the test suite idea, I would keep it really simple and
simply focus on compilation and linking of the uninstalled examples.

Alan

email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902=09FAX: 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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