On 2006-11-02 13:15-0600 Geoffrey Furnish wrote: > [...]What I said was, to reduce the > barrier to adoption, the CBS cutover should include a "configure" script > which takes the same options as the old one, but which runs cmake as it's > final act. And a functional plplot-config.
These are good ideas which it would be nice to see implemented before the stable release that culminates the series of forthcoming development releases. Now we need a volunteer. Would you be willing to take off your PLplot user hat and put on your PLplot developer hat and volunteer to help with this implementation? It has been a while since you contributed to PLplot as a core developer, and since you feel strongly about this issue, perhaps this is an excellent opportunity for you to get involved again. The required scripting is non-trivial. For example, the new configure script would have to check that cmake with the correct version number was installed on the system, and use it (with transformation of option syntax) if there and otherwise fall back (with a deprecation warning) to the autotools (renamed) configure script that will be part of the tarball. There should also be a future to force use of the old configure script since that is absolutely necessary if you are going to use plplot_libtool (see below). plplot-config (which uses plplot_libtool which is simply a renamed 221K [!] configured [as in the current autotools-based configure] libtool script) is currently deprecated in favour of the pkg-config approach in general and also it will be further deprecated since it uses a facility (a libtool script that must be configured by the current autotools-related configure command) that is associated with our deprecated ABS. So rewriting plplot-config to use the pkg-config approach if pkg-config is installed and otherwise to use the current (renamed) plplot-config script with a deprecation warning (and warning to force use of the ABS if that wasn't used) is probably the thing to do. > I don't intendt to maintain the autotools system personally. Neither do I. :-) > [...] I have > no personal issues with its [our ABS' deprecation, and am looking forward to a > faster-building and less complicated future with cmake. Good. > > That is no reason to torpedo users' infrastructure for incorporating PLplot > into their host code. > > > * 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. > > A ****day****! GASP! Oh my gosh. Then forget the installed base. I think that is a _slight_ exaggeration. :-) Also, please note the conditionals which I tried to choose carefully in my wording in the above quoted paragraph. The important point I want to emphasize is CMake _is_ a paradigm shift. So 5 minutes is not going to cut it for our _present_ CBS if you are starting from scratch with no experience with CMake whatsoever. (Note all those conditionals...) However, hundreds of projects are making the transition from autotools to CMake so it is far from a hopeless transition to deal with. Note also, that in general such transitions are rapidly getting easier as CMake expertise grows amongst those who build packages (such as PLplot) from scratch. All ideas to make the PLplot transition smoother (such as yours above which indeed might turn the transition into a 5-minute event for some users) are welcome, but we do need help in implementing such ideas (which required fairly complicated scripts) before our next stable release. 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
