Orion has done good work for us over the years testing PLplot in a
pioneering way using a Linux platform (Fedora's latest version) where
only cutting-edge versions of software packages are available.  But
now it is possible to help him out a little bit by testing PLplot
against the latest versions of software that you have built yourself
with build_projects.

As a case in point I have just now (revision 12628) implemented a
Tcl-8.6.1 build with build_projects.  That is definitely a
cutting-edge version of Tk because it was only released in September,
and the 8.6.x series is the first version of Tcl to integrate iTcl
(version 4.0.0).  The build and install of Tcl and iTcl only took a
few minutes.

I attempted a PLplot build and test against that newly installed
software, and immediately found and fixed (revision 12627) a minor
build system issue (had to bump the maximum itcl version looked for to
4.0.0).  But after that fix, the PLplot configuration found all
appropriate locations for headers and libraries for Tcl-8.6.1 and
iTcl-4.0.0, the build proceeded without issues, and the test_diff_psc
target showed no differences between the Tcl and corresponding C
results for all our standard examples.  So I am pleased by that
positive result.

Note, I think the above PLplot test only tests Tcl, and not iTcl.
But my agenda for tomorrow (Friday) is implementing a
build_projects configuration for building and installing Tk-8.6.1.
Assuming I can get that to work, then the PLplot test of
that will definitely include a test of iTcl.

Later I plan to try and get both Tcl and Tk to build on Wine.
According to the Tcl notes for such builds, I can use a very similar
build procedure under MinGW/MSYS that I do on Linux, but with one
caveat; Tcl no longer supports pure 32-bit Windows. Instead, you
apparently need a WoW64 Windows setup (a mixture of 32-bit and
64-bit).  That's actually available for Wine, but I estimate it is
going to take quite a bit of effort to build that WoW64 version of
Wine and install all the necessary Windows software (MinGW/MSYS,
CMake, Python, etc.) on that new version of the Wine platform.  So
this effort may stretch into late next week.

N.B. I do expect the Linux build of Tk to be useful for testing PLplot
on cutting-edge Tk.  But for now the corresponding Windows build of Tk
(if it works) will mostly just be a curiosity since it will be the
version of Tk that just uses a subset of the X calls.  But I am going
to attempt that Tk build on Windows for completeness, and because it
might be useful later.  In fact, currently I believe there is even a
few simple tests you can run against that "subset" version of Tk using
PLplot (the "runAllDemos.tcl" code that can be tested using the
procedure in examples/tk/README.tkdemos was originally developed on
Windows and uses its own unique bindings located at binding/tk-x-plat
that stay within the subset API of Tk).

In sum, I have made a good start toward the goal of supplying some
interesting test results for the latest versions of Tcl and Tk for
both Linux and Windows.

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
__________________________

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