As PLplot release manager, my current release plan for 5.12.0 is to declare a freeze for merging in large developments into our git master branch as of this Saturday, December 3rd, which will give us a two-week test period (for running tests and debugging any issues that show up as a result of those tests) between then and the planned release date of December 17th. I am warning ahead about those two significant dates that start and end the test period because I am hoping for lots of testing help from guys to make this release of 5.12.0 as high quality as possible.
Those who would like to help with testing our git master branch (which is going to end up as 5.12.0) might want to consider starting with such testing now (assuming you have access to real Unices like Linux and Mac OS X or Unix-like platforms such as Cygwin or MinGW-w64/MSYS2 which provide the executables such as bash that we need for comprehensive testing). The first order of business is to gain access to the PLplot git master branch following the directions at <https://sourceforge.net/p/plplot/plplot/ci/master/tree/>. Then read the release notes in README.release which documents the changes made for 5.12.0. After that, comprehensive testing is simple for humans but gives your computer a real workout. Essentially all you have to do is set up the relevant environment variables that you normally use to build PLplot, then run the bash script scripts/comprehensive_testing.sh --help and scripts/comprehensive_testing.sh --do_test_interactive no That first command gives you extensive documentation of the capabilities of the script. Often you leave almost everything as default as in the second command which should provide a valuable comprehensive test of the noninteractive parts of PLplot on your computer platform. I have had recent success with the above script with no options (i.e., both interactive and noninteractive comprehensive tests were run) on Linux (Debian Jessie) so with any luck at all, you should be able to replicate that success on other platforms as well at least for the non-interactive portion of the tests. You will likely want to wait until you have complete noninteractive success before you run the interactive component of the comprehensive tests because such interactive tests necessarily mean you have to babysit the test as you click on all the GUI's simply to get through all the interactive exampes to finish the test. (The point of these interactive comprehensive tests is to run through as many interactive examples as possible to check for major run-time issues like segfaults so there is a lot of boring clicking involved, and if you choose not to do that and only provide non-interactive comperhensive test results that is extremely valuable to us as well.) The script creates a report tarball (normally stored as ../comprehensive_test_disposable/comprehensive_test.tar.gz) containing the key results from your test which I ask you to send to me if the script fails to finish so I can diagnose what went wrong for you. (I also ask you to send that tarball to me if the script succeeds and you give me permission to post the details of that success at <https://sourceforge.net/p/plplot/wiki/Testing_PLplot/#Testing%20Reports>. Anyhow, I hope to start seeing some preliminaary test report tarballs from you guys soon with even more finalized reports later on a wide variety of platforms during our key two-week test period where we plan to keep PLplot changes as minimal as possible consistent with fixing the bugs you guys find as a result of these comprehensive tests. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Plplot-general mailing list Plplot-general@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-general
