On 2015-01-22 10:35+0100 Arnaud Darmont wrote: > We are not going to deploy anything like this on our customer's machines. It has to run in a windows install without any specific external requirements.
Umm. The whole point of static linking is to avoid external requirements. > I will look for another plotting library. It will be less work. It sounds like you have made up your mind so good luck with that. For others reading this thread now or in the future, it is not quite that simple. I think every good plotting package worth its salt has external libraries it depends on so the static linking method I described earlier in this thread must be used to avoid deployment issues. So Arnaud's real complaint against PLplot is he would have to figure out how to statically link PLplot against static external libraries with some of that work requiring CMake investigation. And that is certainly a valid complaint. Therefore, it would likely be a good idea for us to do at least part of that work ourselves in the future, i.e., do the experiments with CMake to figure out how to compel use of static external libraries, and publish a script and/or put clear directions on our Wiki so someone like Arnaud could just routinely follow those directions and be done with no further investigation required on his part. Another alternative would be for us to distribute a binary static version of PLplot linked in the manner I have described on our own. But I don't advocate that exact alternative because distributors of binary versions of other's free software have certain responsibilities (i.e., to publish [not just link to] exact source code for other's free software that you have included in the binary distribution). That's certainly doable (after all every official binary distribution of free software does that), but it takes work to package up all that source code for Qt5, Pango/Cairo, wxwidgets, etc. Instead, what we should do is figure out a way to package up our software (both in static and shared form) as an official part of the Cygwin distribution and the MinGW-w64/MSYS distribution. Such official binary distributions automatically satisfy the source code distribution requirement I have mentioned. So in sum, with a lot of additional work on our part we would be in a position to tell somone with Arnaud's deployment needs to follow the Wiki directions, run the equivalent script, or link to the static version of PLplot in one of those distributions. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA. GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn. Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth. Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant. http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet _______________________________________________ Plplot-general mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-general
