Re: [Plplot-devel] Re: [Plplot-general] libqhull

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

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

> * Alan W. Irwin <ir...@be...> [2003-03-14 09:26]:
>
> > On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> >
> > > Long answer: This is a bad side-effect of using plplot_libtool, instead of a
> > > full-fledged solution with the right libraries put in the Makefile.
> >
> > NO.  You keep forgetting that libtool is a configured script that is
> > adjusted exactly (and only) for the build system.  See below.
>
> Yes, this ideal situation only happens when the user build himself both
> libqhull and libplplot in the same system and never removed the libqhull.la
> file.

No.  Joao's, your, and my systems are the counter-examples here.  None of us
(I assume) built libqhull.  Instead, it was supplied as a binary with and
without libqhull.la on our various systems, yet for that variety of
situations plplot_libtool is working fine. Essentially the user should not
go wrong if they stick with the system where they built plplot and use the
plplot_libtool script configured for that system.

It is a different story if a binary package of plplot is provided, but that
is a controlled environment where you know exactly what was on the build
machine, and you can force the user to also install the same.  In that case
if you get the libplplot-dev package dependencies correct, then again the
user cannot go wrong using plplot_libtool.


> A mismatch happened with my Debian packages, as reported by
> Christophe.  So, the bad side effect may and _does_ happen in some cases.  I
> already decided to change the libplplot-dev package dependencies, so there
> will be no problem.
>

No.  Actually, the problem was that Christophe had not installed the dev
packages, and the problem went away when he did so.  So that definitely does
not prove your case that something must be wrong with plplot_libtool.

To sum this up, there are no demonstrated problems with plplot_libtool
either when the user is building plplot or in the binary plplot package case
when the dev package dependencies are correct. Thus, "If it ain't broke
don't fix it."

Will you quit complaining about plplot_libtool if I change its name to
plplot-libtool?   ;-)  (To explain the joke to the rest of you, Rafael
has told me in the past that he hates underscores and loves hyphens.)

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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Linux-powered Science
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