[Plplot-devel] Next release

[<jc...@fe...>]

Hi,

I have a certain amount of improvements in my sources that I'm reserving 
to commit for a future (not the April) release. The reasoning is that 
the April release will be to fix bugs.

But now I'm starting to think that a newer release will only happen in 
within a year, as we usually only release once a year, given our 
limited human resources.
I thus think that's a pity that my improvements will only reach users in 
2004. Also, the "bug fix" turned out to be a major configuration 
redesign.

My question is if we should not abandon the bug fix release, and take 
the April opportunity to make a new real release instead.

Most of my changes are only small improvements, but I have a new API 
entry to submit. It's an utility function to grid data, removing the 
limitation that our 3D data plots have of using regularly sampled data.
The new function, plgriddata(), does no plotting at all and implies no 
changes to any other plplot function, and so it will not break 
anything.
plgriddata() takes non-uniformly sampled data and will resample it using  
several techniques, returning gridded data ready for use with our 3D 
data APIs.

The new function requires access to an well know external library, Qhull
 (that Rafael knows well), http://www.thesa.com/software/qhull/,
and to other simple libraries, libnn and libcsa, 
http://www.marine.csiro.au/~sakov/

libnn and libcsa are small libraries not widely know and its 
configuration does not supports shared libraries. libnn also needs a 
patch to work with Qhull, because by default it works with "triangle", 
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~quake/triangle.html, which is a non-free 
program.

I think that the most effective way of using libnn and libcsa is to 
incorporate them into our source tree. I have already asked to libcsa 
and libnn author's permission, and he agreed.

Comments?

Joao