Hi, > Hmm... It's interesting [...] > > 1) It adds parallel maintenance that Werner and Arjen have to apply to > the jim scripts any time there is a change to plplot-test.sh and the > other test*.sh scripts. This is all fairly trivial stuff (adding new > examples, finding better ways to configure the tests), but there is a fair > amount of churn, and it will be irritating to keep the two systems in sync. > > 2) There is also a maintenance burden for jim itself. Werner and Arjen have > to keep track of new jim releases, make judgement calls about the stability of > those releases, and decide when to deploy them into the PLplot code base. > > The first of these reservations also applies to all other parallel scripting > systems (with python, perl, or whatever) which is why my opinion _now_ is we > should reject all of them. I only brought up the idea of parallel scripts > originally because I was under the impression no bash solutions were > available for windows, but it appears that such solutions exist. In fact, > Werner was able to get all but the java ctests passed with the windows bash > solution he found, and I doubt a solution is far away in that case.
I think, Arjen ment that we replace the sh-scripts with jim/tcl-scripts. So for Linux, we don't need to compile jim, since tcl might be available most of the times, and for Windows we use jim. So this might be a good solution. > > It appears the only downside to the windows bash solution is our windows > developers and users will need to independently install bash if they want to > use ctest and/or the install-tree plplot-test.sh tests. I doubt installing > a windows bash is going to be a difficult burden for Arjen or any other > windows developer that wants to contribute to PLplot since Werner has > already been successful at this, and almost by definition our developers are > good at installing PLplot dependencies. That leaves only the question of > our users. To make life easier for them, I think we should put together a > test to look for bash. If that test fails we should give the appropriate > warning message, force BUILD_TEST to OFF, and not configure or install > plplot-test.sh and the test*.sh scripts. Also, Werner should expand our > wiki a bit more giving a reference to windows bash and perhaps a sentence or > two about how to install it if that is not obvious. I can do that (the wiki stuff), but have to mention, that the bash is really not a good solution in the moment. e.g. cmake doesn't like sh.exe in the path if I use MinGW/CLI combination, I have to rename it, run cmake, rename sh again to run the tests. And then we would need still some tweaking - it works far from perfect in the moment, and all tweaks are actually hacks, since you always need to program around the fact, that bash isn't actually meant to be there. > > With those changes it should be straightforward for our windows users to > install bash, but if they choose not to do so, all that will happen is they > will receive a CMake warning and the ctest functionality will be missing and > install tree tests not available. So it will be exactly like any other > component of PLplot. If you want a particular PLplot component you have to > pay the price of installing the relevant software. > > In sum, I have given my reasons why I prefer a uniform bash solution for all > platforms (especially since it apparently already works on bare windows > except for one minor Java issue). However, if the windows developers still > prefer the jim/tcl alternative (and are willing to develop it and more > importantly maintain it), I will go along since windows developers know > a lot more about windows than I do. :-) We may should do some test first, if the jim solution is really the best one, since we might run into the same trouble as with bash - don't know how good tcl/jim is with the filenames. Werner ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
