On 2017-07-15 20:49+0200 Ole Streicher wrote:
Hi Alan,
On 15.07.2017 20:37, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
Sometimes our bindings libraries have the same core name (e.g.,
wxwidgets, qt) as the device driver, but bindings libraries and
device drivers are completely different and there is no chance of a
nameclash between them. So there should be no issue of concern in
this case.
My question here is mainly if they should reside in the same package. As
far as I understand you, they should go into separate packages.
To explain further we have three major configuration modes
1. The default (-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON, -DENABLE_DYNDRIVERS=ON) which
builds shared PLplot libraries and dynamically
loaded (separate) devices.
2. Shared PLplot libraries (-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON) and nondynamic devices
(-DENABLE_DYNDRIVERS=OFF)
where the C and C++ device driver
code is made part of our core library.
3. Static PLplot libraries (-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF which forces
-DENABLE_DYNDRIVERS=OFF)
We continue to maintain 2 for historical reasons, and probably the
same could be said of 3. But from your question I assume you are using
1.
Furthermore, your question inspired me to look at the
-DDEFAULT_NO_DEVICES=ON case (for 1 although case 2 and 3 should give
similar results). For that case (and assuming you do not specify any
devices to build which is what I did) the library and examples build
without issues, but they are useless. Here is an example of what
happens:
software@raven> examples/c/x00c
*** PLPLOT ERROR, IMMEDIATE EXIT ***
No device drivers found - please check the environment variable
PLPLOT_DRV_DIR
Program aborted
So it is your call as packager, but you should be aware for case 1 if
you do split up the library and dynamic devices, and a user installs
only the library, that library will be essentially useless.
Of course, I just noticed the above warning message when no device
drivers are installed is pretty useless/misleading, but I don't want
to deal with that now so if someone wants to send a patch....
Another small question: We maintain some metadata about our packages,
and one of the entries is the preferred citation. Is there a paper that
should serve as a reference for plplot?
There is
<http://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgabe/1996/12/Plplot/plplot.html>, but
that link is now broken, the linux magazin search function cannot find
it, I never understood that article because it was written in German,
and by now it would be completely out of date in any case. Note to
self: remove that link from our documentation.
Another slightly better possibility (but still bad) is users have
created the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLplot,
but that is already quite dated (e.g., it refers to our subversion
repository!) and is seriously incomplete, i.e., it simply copies a
small subset of an extremely dated copy of the plplot.sourceforge.net website
which I assume your metadata already refers to as our home page.
So I think the best answer to your question in the short term is no,
you should leave the "preferred citation" metadata empty.
But in the long-term I think it is important for one of the PLplot
developers or heavily interested users to write up PLplot in an
accessible article simply to give some much-needed publicity to this
quite useful plotting solution. Any volunteers?
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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