Re: [Plplot-devel] New way of getting device info from dyndrivers

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

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> 3) When the library is initialized, if dyndrivers are enabled, the drivers
>    directory is scanned for the *.la files.  Each found driver is dlopened
>    and the DEVICE_INFO_<driver> symbol is read and put in a temporary file.

Are you using "dlopen" in the generic sense here?  The actual call should
be to lt_dlopenext, and you have to be careful of the argument (follow
exactly what I did with drvnam and drvspec so the file name comes out exactly
the same to get it to work cross-platform).


>    c) At build time (not configuration time), a small C program dlopen the
>       <driver>.c files,

Same comment.  My initial use of lt_dlopenext worked fine on Linux but died
horribly on OSF1 until I made my final changes to the lt_dlopenext argument.

> Postscript
> ==========
>
> In doing my changes, I noticed that the following drivers have never had
> entries in drivers.db:  plbuf.c and next.c.  Does anyone know why?

IIRC next.c is completely unmaintained and kept in CVS only as an
encouragment for somebody, someday, to get it going again.

plbuf.c is not a driver in the traditional sense.  I believe it is in the
wrong directory and should be put in src instead.  It's code is put directly
into the libplplot library (see src/Makefile.am).

> I also noticed that the
> pstex entry was wrongly written in drivers.db.  Apparently, this bug have
> never bothered our users...

I have forgotten the details, but IIRC, I checked that drivers.db anomaly
before, and I am pretty sure it is necessary in order for pstex to work.
Something to do with the way pstex depends on ps or vice versa.

Joao, do you remember about this?

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).

__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________