Re: [Plplot-devel] Make of plplot-5.2.0 fails on a freshly installed Red-Hat-8.0.

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

On Mon, 27 Jan 2003, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

> This is a very serious bug and I will try to find some time tonight to try
> to find a decent solution.  I agree with Alan that this must be fixed
> properly.  Workarounds today will only result on headaches tomorrow.
>
> I think that if/when this bug is fixed, a new 5.2.1 tarball will have to be
> released.

I suggest using a dual-track short-term and long-term strategy for solving
the problem.  Short-term so that those who have already downloaded 5.2.0
can get something out of it, and long-term for a more fundamental solution.

(1) Short-term (time scale of a day or so).  Joao and Maurice, will you
please try the suggested workaround to make sure it cures all the problems
you found? With the current plplot-5.2.0 tarball simply unpack it and touch
include/plDevs.h.in before running configure; make; make install.  If I am
right about this "touch" workaround, there should be absolutely no attempt
to run autoheader (or any other autotool) at the make stage.  I will do the
same test here (this evening after work).  If we all find no problems, then
I will immediately publish that workaround to plplot-general (and in the SF
release notes for 5.2.0) and also indicate we are working on plplot-5.2.1
which will solve the problem at a more fundamental level.

(2) Longer term (time scale of a week or so). Find a fundamental solution. I
believe this is absolutely necessary because from my further reading of the
documentation of AM_CONFIG_HEADER and its autoconf counterpart
AC_CONFIG_HEADER, it is amazing our use of two files in the argument list
for AM_CONFIG_HEADER actually worked at all (albeit with the date problems
for plDevs.h.in).  There is still a lot of change going on with both
automake and autoconf so I would be most surprised if our two-file solution
worked in the slightest for future autoconf/autoheader versions.

Rafael, you have much more autoconf expertise than I do, so I very much
appreciate your offer to try and find a fundamental solution.  Without your
effort it might take a number of weekends for me to find a solution.

Once such a fundamental solution is found (and I do hope Rafael is able to
find such a solution tonight), I will adjust the version (the people
maintaining all the windows versions in sys will have to follow with their
own version number changes) soon after and bring out 5.2.1 on the next
weekend (hopefully, this weekend if Rafael is immediately successful).

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and
Analysis (www.cccma.bc.ec.gc.ca) and the PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org).

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