The "p" octave examples were designed many years ago by Joao Cardoso (since retired from PLplot). At that time, -dev xwin worked for most/all of those "p" examples and gave some nice-looking interactive effects. (Joao had an extraordinary artistic ability to make good-looking examples.) However, -dev psc did not react well to some of those interactive effects so in our non-interactive tests that use -dev psc we have automatically dropped many of those "p" examples from consideration.
I have recently implemented test_octave_$device targets for all our interactive devices in an attempt to test _all_ the "p" octave examples for our interactive devices. It uses the configured script plplot-test.sh(.in) with option --interactive_octave to make a call to the configured script test_octave_interactive.sh(.in). It's that latter script that must be modified if you want to change the list of "p" examples that are tested by test_octave_qtwidget. (I temporarily dropped some of those examples from consideration because of various issues that I commented in test_octave_interactive.sh(.in). I mention that interactive test target specificially because -dev qtwidget currently is the best of all our interactive devices at interacting with octave. For example, some kind of bit rot has set in and test_octave_xwin and test_octave_tk (which exercise -dev xwin and -dev tk for these interactive octave tests) both error out immediately. That is a shame because I remember that it used to work (reasonably) well (at least for -dev xwin, but I am sure I tried -dev tk back then as well). test_octave_xcairo is painfully slow (this interactive issue for -dev xcairo has been reported independently as bug 2960406) on my platform so I didn't have the patience to try the test_octave_xcairo target. test_octave_wxwidgets works fine on individual examples, but currently there is some incompatibility between how the p examples are exited and reentered in octave and -dev wxwidgets so for any list of examples that has more than one example, test_octave_wxwidgets always segfaults on the second example tried. I have reported these general device driver/octave issues as well as a number of individual issues for individual "p" examples that have been turned up by this new test on our bugtracker (bug 2964497). I have assigned this bug to Andrew because he is our octave go-to guy, but I encourage anyone else here with an interest in octave (or the xcairo, xwin, and wxwidgets devices) to also tackle this list of issues. The first goal should be to extend the range of "p" examples working for qt_widget. There is some low-hanging fruit there where the plot GUI comes up, goes through its interesting interactivity, but then hangs on exit (presumably because the "p" example in question doesn't exit properly). Once p1 through p21 are working for qtwidget, then it would be good to get xwin working properly with these octave examples again and then the remainder of our interactive devices. Also, I am sure as more interactive devices are made to work with these examples some design decisions that Joao made (sizes of legends, for example) to tune the examples to work with -dev xwin will have to be reviewed to give a polished look for our other interactive devices. Ultimately, we may decide to reinstate the full list of "p" examples that are exercised in the standard noninteractive test as well. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
