On 2008-04-17 14:55-0600 Doug Hunt wrote: > Hi Craig: I've been using PLplot successfully for quite a while now. > Originally, I switched to it because PGPLOT was such a bear to install. > > Unfortunately, the newest PLplot has added many dependencies, so its getting > harder to install. On the plus side, its getting many new interesting > features and it has an active development community that is working well > together.
Note, those extra dependencies are only required if you want the new PLplot features. If a dependency is missing for a user's platform, we try hard to make our CMake-based build system deal with that in a smooth way by removing the extra feature (with a WARNING message about that removal in the output from the cmake command) and continuing. Furthermore, if the dependency is there, but your platform is having some trouble with it, it is completely straightforward to configure our build system to drop particular features (normally language bindings and/or drivers) or even drop all added features by default and add back (say) our basic postscript driver (which has no external dependencies) so that you will get at least some plot output. Also, any effort to "seriously tweak the make files" is probably never going to lead to a useful conclusion (as Craig found in his specific case). Our CMake-based build system automatically generates those Makefiles so you are almost bound to generate extra errors if you start tweaking them in a major way. I suggest to Craig that he should follow the PLplot build directions (at http://www.miscdebris.net/plplot_wiki/). If he follows those directions and still has build issues, he should report those issues to either the plplot devel list or the plplot-general list where normally we are quick to respond to such reports. The statistics at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2915 show our latest PLplot release has been downloaded more than 1600 times since February. I don't know what fraction of those downloaders use the Mac OS X platform, but PLplot has been available for Mac OS X for many years so I assume that fraction is substantial. Anyhow, IIRC no Mac OS X build issues have been reported from any of those downloaders which I hope encourages Craig to give the PLplot build on Mac OS X another try. BTW, Doug, I am not subscribed to the PDL list so could you please forward this response to that list? TIA. 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 libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
