Another good result I just recently discovered for PLplot tests on CMake-2.8.9/MinGW-4.7.0/MSYS/Wine-1.5.16, is
ada Missing examples : Differing postscript output : 16 Missing stdout : Differing stdout : adathick Missing examples : Differing postscript output : 16 Missing stdout : Differing stdout : which is the same as the corresponding Linux platform result. (On both platforms example 16 is different from the C version because Andrew's recent C example 16 changes have not yet been propagated to Ada and most of our other languages.) MinGW support of the Ada variant of gcc has been iffy in the past with some MinGW releases including it and some not. In fact, I cannot remember if I have ever gotten such a good Ada result with MinGW before. But from these results it appears that those using CMake-2.8.9 (and previous) and MinGW-4.7.0 on Windows should have no issues with our Ada bindings or running our Ada examples. So that's the good Ada news. The bad news is that there has been a serious change in the CMake infrastructure for supporting languages during the 2.8.10 release cycle with the result that both Ada and D do not work for CMake-2.8.10-rc3 while they work fine for CMake-2.8.9. It was only by chance that I extended the PLplot test to include Ada on Wine with CMake-CMake-2.8.10-rc3, found the Ada issue for that CMake version, and then when I attempted to confirm that on Linux found the additional D issue as well for that CMake version. But at least I did find it in time before the planned release of CMake-2.8.10 on Monday. The CMake developers have a well-deserved reputation for keeping backward compatibility. But in this case, they appear to have failed to keep backwards compatibility for their language support infrastructure. I have informed the CMake developers of this bad situation for 2.8.10-rc3, and they have acknowledged that report. It's possible they will just go ahead and release 2.8.10 on Monday, and let those like us who provide CMake support for additional languages such as Ada and D pick up the pieces ourselves. That's the worst case scenario while the best case scenario would be one where they delayed their release to re-establish backwards compatibility for their language support infrastructure (perhaps with a deprecation warning to give us some time to adjust our language support for Ada and D to use the new infrastructure). But we will see. We can draw lessons from this episode for PLplot development as well. You just never know the seriousness of the impact of backwards-incompatible changes. On the other hand, any actively developed code including the PLplot code needs a constant stream of such changes because otherwise the code would get much too crufty and eventually unmaintainable. So to my mind (and something I would have appreciated from the CMake developers) a good compromise between these two important concerns is such backwards-incompatible changes should be done, but they should be preceded by a well-advertised deprecation period where it takes some effort (e.g., using the -DPL_DEPRECATED=ON cmake option) for the user to gain access to the old way of doing things. I did express some initial support for waiving such a deprecation period for our planned removal of the old format plmap files and the code that reads those files, but with quiet influence from Andrew, sanity eventually prevailed with me, and we ended up doing exactly the right thing with handling this necessary backwards-incompatible change. Long may that approach contine with further backwards-incompatible changes with PLplot! 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); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ WINDOWS 8 is here. Millions of people. Your app in 30 days. Visit The Windows 8 Center at Sourceforge for all your go to resources. http://windows8center.sourceforge.net/ join-generation-app-and-make-money-coding-fast/ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
