My current comprehensive testing of PLplot is looking good both for Linux and the classical MinGW/MSYS1 combination. So this is an excellent opportunity for everyone who participated in the testing for the last release to do at least equivalent testing for this release as well. And you might want to extend your testing for this release beyond what you did before.
The first fruits of Arjen trying such a test extension by attempting to replicate my good 32-bit MinGW/MSYS/Wine results on 64-bit Windows has been a failure. However, in retrospect that failure can easily be explained by the hypothesis that one or more of the packages that are built by epa_build only have Windows 32-bit compatibility. So Arjen is going to test that working hypothesis by attempting to replicate my good results on a 32-bit Windows system. Furthermore, I have just discovered completely different modern versions of MinGW and MSYS that are independent projects that are designed to replace the classical MinGW and MSYS1 we have been using up to now. The modern MSYS version is called MSYS2, and apparently it is built with a modern replacement for MinGW called MinGW-w64. I discovered this modern MinGW/MSYS combination when looking at alternatives for Arjen to work around the well-known MSYS1 bug 1950. Google found a mention of MSYS2, and a query about that on the mingw-user list got back nothing but positive responses about MSYS2 and a hint that I would need MinGW-w64 as well. Also, there was a hint that MSYS2 is much more extensive than MSYS1 so if that satisfies more PLplot dependencies it will provide a more powerful PLplot test platform than the classic MinGW/MSYS1 combination. So in the spirit of making sure this release is well tested, I am going to give MinGW-w64/MSYS2 a try to see how far I can push epa_build and PLplot testing on Wine-1.6.1 for that combination. And if that is a success, I will ask Arjen to switch to MinGW-w64/MSYS2 as well since it appears MSYS1 (from the evidence of low traffic on the mingw-users list and the lack of a fix for bug 1950 in a year now) is close to being a dead project. Installing MinGW-w64/MSYS2 and testing it on Wine-1.6.1 will obviously take some additional time and effort, but I think it will be worth it not only for me but also Arjen and other Windows users who want to use epa_build to test PLplot. So as indicated by the new subject line I have bumped the ETA of the PLplot release one more week (to February 17th). This change also gives others here more chance to test this release on platforms other than MinGW/MSYS. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Managing the Performance of Cloud-Based Applications Take advantage of what the Cloud has to offer - Avoid Common Pitfalls. Read the Whitepaper. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=121051231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
