To Werner and Arjen: I hope this is a good time for one of you to start moving ahead on the small project of creating a binary release of PLplot for windows using cpack. I believe when we discussed this before, we were all in agreement this would be a good thing to do since, for example, major SF projects that have a windows port almost always include a windows binary version. I bring it up again now because (a) you are mostly done with the higher priority work of making sure all the PLplot features work properly on windows, and (b) there has just now been a request for such a binary release of PLplot for windows on the PDL list. In response to this request, it would be nice to bring out a binary release of PLplot for windows a few days after the scheduled source release in January (and after every source release thereafter), and from my experiments today I think only a small amount of additional debugging work should be required to make that happen.
Assuming you want to go ahead with a binary release of PLplot for windows on that sort of time scale, then you should note we already use cpack to provide our source release of PLplot --- see the cpack-related items at the end of the top-level CMakeLists.txt file. These create a target called "package_source" which invokes cpack to pack everything in the source directory into a tarball. That target works well on Linux (in fact, we use it to create our source release tarball in scripts/make_tarball.sh), and you should also confirm it works well on windows. Similarly, a target called "package" is automatically created by our use of "include(CPack)" in our top-level CMakeLists.txt file. That target is supposed to invoke cpack to pack everything in the install tree into a tarball. Just now I tried make package but that yields an empty result for PLplot (with no error message). For CMake itself, that command indeed produces a tarball of the cmake install tree so that target should work similarly for us. I don't know what the PLplot problem with the "package" target is, but I assume intercomparison of our top-level CMakeLists.txt file with that of the cmake project and some experimentation should be able to sort out this PLplot issue. There is also some rudimentary documentation of cpack in (http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake:Packaging_With_CPack) which might be of some help to you. If one of you would like to take on this small debugging project, that would be great since a binary release of PLplot for windows users would apparently be of some help to those users (especially Perl and Python users who ordinarily don't require a compiler). 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
