Geoffrey, your assumption is incorrect. As I have made clear from the first (and also in a recent post to this list), autotools will be deprecated (since nobody has stepped forward to support it any more) but available (including configure and plplot_libtool) in the tarball to ease the transition to our CBS.
That said, since you and Maurice appear to be PLplot developers who intend to continue to use autotools for a while, I am going to rely on you to test our development releases to make sure that no autotools-related problems inadvertently creep in. Also, there are disadvantages for Lightspeed (or anyone else) to adopt our CBS either too early or too late. Some factors that should influence that judgement call about the adoption timing should be at least the following: * There are obvious advantages to waiting while you let early adopters find all but the most obscure bugs. Note, PLplot users tend to be early adopters with lots of downloads of development releases so I think our planned series of development releases should be enough to get rid of all but the most obscure bugs in our CBS. * Our CBS requires CMake to be installed on user's systems. Thus, there are advantages to delaying adoption until CMake is at least widely deployed on Linux distributions. However, that should not be too long now; Debian testing already has cmake-2.4.3 (the version what we require). Also, if you check the archives of the CMake mailing list, it is clear a large number of open-source projects are converting to CMake as I write this. Thus, the pressure will be strong for all distributions to follow Debian's lead if they haven't done so already. * The transition from our ABS to our CBS is actually not that difficult. I would be extremely surprised if it took a moderately experienced PLplot developer (i.e., one who has used our downloads before) more than a day (assuming they follow the steps what we suggest in the PLplot wiki). Those with more experience with PLplot should take substantially less than a day. * There are substantial developer advantages to our CBS (a configuration system that is easier to understand, maintain, and extend than our ABS). * Bit-rot will eventually creep into our ABS unless some developer with a strong need for it steps forward to maintain it. Also, as PLplot keeps getting extended with CBS, none of this new development will be accessible with our ABS. * There are substantial advantages to our CBS for both users and developers (faster configuration as well as the availability of our CBS for the large variety of different windows platforms). Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
