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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135991&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel