[Plplot-devel] support for Windowses

[Joachim W. <wu...@cr...>]

Alan: I fully agree that we must not withdraw existing drivers
for Win95/98/ME. My proposal is rather to put them into a
maintenance-only mode, and to concentrate further development
on the NT line - for the simple reason that it is better to
do something for some users than to do nothing for all users.

Olof: as you know, I modified the Win drivers in order to build
a dynamic library. I have absolutely no idea whether the modified
sources still allow to build a static library (a) under NT, and
(b) under W95/... It would be great if you could find out.

Alan: in case Olof has no time to assemble a unique directory for
static and dynamic Win drivers, I propose the following solution
for the forthcoming release:

../sys/win32/README            # new, text below
../sys/win32/msdev             # unchanged
../sys/win32/dll/README        # new, text below
../sys/win32/dll/plconsole.cpp # take from my patch of jan 15th
../sys/win32/dll/plstub.cpp    # take from my patch of jan 15th
../sys/win32/dll/win3.cpp      # take from my patch of jan 15th

The big advantage of this solution is that I (or any future co-
developer) could continue to work on the dll directory without
caring for backward compatibility with the static library and
old Windowses.

Here comes some text for the READMEs:

../sys/win32/README:
--------------------
The directory ../sys/win32/msdev contains everything you need
for building a static library under Win32 (Win95/98/ME/NT/2k/XP).=20

The directory ../sys/win32/dll contains additional experimental
code for building a shared library (DLL). Development is done
for WinNT/2k/XP only; tests under Win95/98/ME would be welcome.

../sys/win32/dll/README:
------------------------
Building a shared (dynamic link) library plplot.dll is possible
in principle. However, development is still in an experimental
stage. A makefile is not yet available; users will have to use
Visual Studio to build their own plplot project. Input files
should be taken from the ../msdev directory, except for the
modified files contained in the present directory.

In one of the next releases of plplot we would like to distribute
a self-contained win32/dll directory, with all sources and scripts
needed for automatically building plplot.dll; contributions to
this project will be welcome.