We have made lots of progress (see our git log) since the release of 5.12.0 so I am looking forward to releasing 5.13.0 in the near future (i.e., in July or August depending on how much time Arjen has for PLplot this month).
N.B. Please let me know if you would like to squeeze something in before the code freeze for that release. The projects that I am aware of are that should likely be finished before this release are the following (in decreasing order of importance) with the first three considered more release-critical and the last two considered less release critical: * Completely debug the Windows variant of the 3-semaphores approach to IPC between -dev wxwidgets and wxPLViewer. The status of this project is Arjen and I have gone through a number of iterations of code changes on my part and tests on his part, and Arjen still needs to test my latest fix which makes the Windows variant virtually identical to the POSIX variant of this code. Thus, given that the POSIX version gives good results on Linux there is a reasonable chance that we are done at this point with the code fixes, but we won't know until Arjen tests the current code. * Comprehensive tests on the Linux, MinGW-w64/MSYS2, MSVC, Cygwin, and Mac OS X platforms with fixes for all obvious issues discovered with these tests (or if the fix is not obvious or is complex, dropped components of PLplot for the platform in question). The status of this project is as follows: The comprehensive tests on Linux have been recently finished successfully by me (actually for a case where the prefixes for the source, build, and install trees all contained a space, the platform was fully installed so all relevant components of PLplot were tested, and the tests were done for both noninteractive and interactive components of PLplot). In sum, we are in good shape on Linux. Arjen has completed a successful comprehensive test of all relevant noninteractive components of Cygwin much earlier in this release cycle, and more recently he has completed preliminary successful comprehensive tests of limited noninteractive components of PLplot for both the MinGW-w64/MSYS2 and MSVC platforms. My understanding is Arjen plans to follow up by comprehensive tests of the relevant complete noninteractive components of PLplot on Cygwin (this will be a repeat of his earlier test to confirm we are in great shape on this platform for the latest PLplot), MinGW-w64/MSYS2 (fully installed this time), and MSVC (with one noninteractive component removed that did not work last time). And once he is successful with a simple interactive test of wxwidgets on MinGW-w64/MSYS2, he plans to follow up with comprehensive interactive tests of just the wxwidgets component of PLplot on both MinGW-w64/MSYS2 and MSVC (but not Cygwin because of that platform's insistence on using X-based graphics which is a great decision on POSIX platforms but a lousy one on any Windows-based platform like Cygwin because X is so slow on Windows). If some volunteer steps forward to do a comprehensive test of the latest PLplot on Mac OS X, that would be nice, but I don't view that as release critical. * Fix const correctness. The status of that project is it is still in the planning stages, but I have decided my old plan (explained in the release notes for 5.12.0) to change most PLplot generic pointers to have the const attribute is a bad way to create const correctness because that imposes a long-term burden on users of these argument types to never pass back information using the generic pointers in their callbacks. So I am going to back away from that plan and go back to what we had in 5.11.1 which was all our generic pointers in our API have the type PLPointer which is typedefed to void *, and the new generic pointers PL_NC_GENERIC_POINTER and PL_GENERIC_POINTER (both of which were typedefed to void * in 5.12.0, but there _were_ big plans to change PL_GENERIC_POINTER to const void * and use that type for the majority of our generic pointer API) will be dropped. A "would be nice" would be also to eliminate all const correctness concerns (as revealed by the appropriate gcc options) by doing the appropriate deep copies of const types to non-const types when necessary. ------- Projects that are less release critical * Fix well-known fill issues. The status is there are a number of well-known bugs/misdesigns in the current fill code which I want to fix, but with a lot of caution because fills are an ubiquitous part of plotting, and the current fill code is "good enough" for most purposes, i.e., it performs flawlessly for the current standard examples. However, those fixes should not take me that long to complete when I resurrect that topic branch (as I promised to do for this release cycle). If those planned fixes don't generate any fill issues for our current standard examples, then I plan to push it to our master branch. Of course, it would be nice if that pushed branch also fixed the fill problem demonstrated by Phil's special test code, but if not, that branch merge is still worthwhile because it should clarify the fill code and thus make any necessary further fill fixes much easier to do. * Sort out the long-standing OCaml PostScript differences for examples 8, 16, 19, and 33. The status of this project is I have already dealt with the example 8 differences, and I am in the middle of dealing with the example 19 differences. I don't know whether I will be able to get to the example 16 and 23 differences before the release or not. Note all the above topics have uncertain timing so this release will be ready "when it is ready". However, I view the first 3 topics (debug Windows variant of the 3 semaphores approach, comprehensive testing, and fix const correctness) as much more release critical than the last 2 topics so if the first three are completed before either one or both of the last two topics, then in the interest of getting our work for this release cycle accessible to users in a timely manner, I would be inclined to drop the unfinished topics and proceed immediately to a release. So with some luck and depending on how much time Arjen has for PLplot this month, the phrase "near future" might translate into a July release rather than an August release. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
