On Friday, March 13, 2009 at 23:17:57 (-0600) Geoffrey Furnish writes: > I have two different code bases in my professional life that link to PLplot. > Both of them are locked into years-old versions of PLplot. About a year ago > I made the mistake of bumping one of them up to a modern PLplot release, and > then got flooded by users of my code reporting segfaults which took down the > whole application. > > The problems are mostly apparently something having to do with the Tk widget > (plframe). But the point is, it's been broken for many many releases, it > prevents me from updating to trunk on two professional projects until I find > and fix the bug(s). > > I am committed to doing this, as time allows, and will propagate the fixes to > the PLplot repo (svn or perhaps a git repo if we can get there) when I have > them. > > I am just trying to drive the point that the current situation with PLplot is > not entirely ducky. There are long standing problems that need fixing.
I'm just quoting a portion of this thread in order to make a couple of quick comments. There's no substitute for putting in the time, and there both you and I have faltered over the last few years (understandably, given our other priorities). Heck, there's still readme files at the top level that have been out of date for over a decade, but that's a bit beside the point. Tools march on, and we need to regularly update the corner of it we need. IMO that's to a large degree orthogonal to the SCM we're using for such a small project. An anecdote: last year I finally lost an old RedHat 7.3 server I'd been running as a backup machine and for some legacy tools I just *had* to have that for some reason have been left behind by modern distros. I considered rebuilding the machine but certainly I could hack something? Heh. Well.. after some dependency hell with one package I managed to build it from source; for the other I failed miserably. However it turned out the older version (it was Tcl based) worked once I was willing to dive in & debug some Tcl bugs. Yay.. put off from switching away from my trusty old tools for a few more years. :) Don't get me wrong, I love working with git. In my professional work all our projects have been converted to git (no need to worry about a windows client there, fortunately). However I don't consider it a painless transition for cvs/svn users by a long shot. You will lose time & hair in the short term. And even assuming an acceptable windows client, whoever is advocating the git switchover better anticipate at least 6 months answering questions from the developers who are just getting started with git. There's *still* some areas where git is not that user friendly in my book (arcane error messages to start). And a more powerful tool sometimes means more powerful ways of messing up. So to summarize, if plplot were put under git, that would be just peachy for me. However I'm not about to advocate it. :) -- Maurice LeBrun ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Apps built with the Adobe(R) Flex(R) framework and Flex Builder(TM) are powering Web 2.0 with engaging, cross-platform capabilities. Quickly and easily build your RIAs with Flex Builder, the Eclipse(TM)based development software that enables intelligent coding and step-through debugging. Download the free 60 day trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/www-adobe-com _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
