Re: [Plplot-devel] Some minor debugging probably all that is required to obtain a binary release of PLplot for windows
Hi Arjen, The problem with the additional libraries is that right now we rely on them being present at build-time and at run-time - we do not have mechanisms to detect whether they are actually available at run-time. Nothing to worry about in the current way of working, but a nuisance when we deliver binaries: If a program that relies (directly or indirectly) on a DLL (like gd.dll) can not find it at start-up, you may get a message about it not being able to find some DLL _or_ it just dies. I know of no way to prevent that from happening, unless we explicitly load the DLL - in a libtool-like fashion. I think the way to go is the way Alan and I agreed on. Write batch files which you and I use to make these packages privately. It should work like that: 1) Having a working plplot library, with all libraries included, which we want to include - in the moment gd, freetype, cd, wxwidgets, agg, qhull are external, while only gd and wxwidgets are actually dlls for Visual C++ 6.0 (others are statically linked in). 2) Run a batch file, which runs: a) make package b) untar the package somewhere temporarily (since tar is no good for windows) c) copy possible dlls into the directory where plplotd.dll resides d) zip it You need only tar and zip from somewhere (e.g. gnuwin32.sf.net), since windows doesn't provide it by default You don't have any more problems regarding the external dlls, since they are in the same place as plplotd.dll - and if plplotd.dll can be found, all other dlls can be found as well. I think this is the way to go - this would be no official batch file, just one for you and me, or others who are interested in providing binaries for some configuration we don't have. Werner -- Dipl. Ing. Werner Smekal Institut fuer Allgemeine Physik Technische Universitaet Wien Wiedner Hauptstr 8-10 A-1040 Wien Austria email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web: http://www.iap.tuwien.ac.at/~smekal phone: +43-(0)1-58801-13463 (office) +43-(0)1-58801-13469 (laboratory) fax: +43-(0)1-58801-13499 - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
Re: [Plplot-devel] Some minor debugging probably all that is required to obtain a binary release of PLplot for windows
Hi Jim, What third party libraries do I need to include? You don't need to include them, but they provide additional functionality or drivers. In the moment these are: * gd library - used for the gd driver (png, jpeg, gif output) * freetype library - used for nice font rendering in some drivers (e.g. wingcc) * qhull library - not sure actually, but I think it is used for interpolation in grids, so they look more nicely (or something similar :) * cd library - used for the cd driver (cd output) * wxWidgets library - used for the wxWidgets driver * AGG library - used in the wxWidgets driver to get antialized rendering All these libraries work and compile on Windows and the instructions can be found here: http://www.miscdebris.net/plplot_wiki/index.php?title=Install_3rd_party_libraries Or actually will be found at this position if I manage to complete them :). But in the progress of making a binary package I will complete this instructions and it would be cool if someone would test them. Werner - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
Re: [Plplot-devel] Some minor debugging probably all that is required to obtain a binary release of PLplot for windows
Werner Smekal wrote: * qhull library - not sure actually, but I think it is used for interpolation in grids, so they look more nicely (or something similar :) qhull is a library/program to determine the convex hull of a set of points in n dimensions. The CSIRO library that is part of PLplot uses this for certain interpolation methods. (Convex hulls in n dimensions are related to Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations in n-1 dimensions). Regards, Arjen - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
Re: [Plplot-devel] Ada bindings
On Dec 20, 2006, at 4:50 AM, Werner Smekal wrote: Hi Jerry, I've spotted your bindings to ada already some time ago. Normally such bindings go into the bindings directory (in the ada case, bindings/ada), and since swig doesn't seem to support ada, your effort was the only possible. I understand that Ada support for SWIG is coming, but I don't know when. Anyway, I don't know much ada, but how is this supposed to work? Which files of your work are actually really needed? All three packages of the (spec and body files) are needed. Some cases may get by without the thin binding and and the common stuff but that would depend on a specific case of usage. The example file uses all three packages and this is recommended. How is ada told then where it can find the bindings? That is up to the particular OS or build system, as typically handled by search paths. How does ada than find the plplot library? This is a linker issue and as such is specific to a particular OS or build system. I did this work in the Xcode IDE on OS X so this is handled by drag-and-drop in that case. It seems that ada can use libraries directly? This is a linker issue--see the above comment. Also, Ada has an extensive built-in C interfacing capability which among other things allows the association of external C symbols to Ada symbols. In the thin bindings you will see many lines that look like this: procedure plwhatever(this : PLINT; that : PLFLT); pragma Import(C, plwhatever, c_ plwhatever); This is the connection to external code, in this case C. (Other languages are also supported, mainly FORTRAN and COBOL, I believe.) However, the Ada programmer does not ever need to be concerned with this detail. Ada implementations require that C constructs map in obvious ways to corresponding Ada constructs. For referencing external data or passing data to subroutines, the pragmas can enforce C or FORTRAN calling conventions. On which platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOSX) is the ada bindings supposed to work? It will work on any platform which has an Ada compiler and a PLplot library. For output, for what it's worth, I tested it with AquaTerm, X11, and the Postscript file options. Could you provide a cookbook what is needed to make the bindings work (for persons who never used ada)? I can provide a help file or readme although compiling sources and linking libraries is just the usual stuff. Command line usage requires compiling your main Ada program, assuming the sources are in your search paths. Compiling Ada is quite easy because every Ada package must specify everything it needs, thus simplifying the build process. Compiling a multi-file program is done by simply directing the compiler to compile the main program. The Ada compiler that is included with gcc is especially easy to invoke, as I understand (not having used any others). After compiling, you tell the linker where the PLplot library is and you're done. And would it also possible for you to port the examples which you can find in the examples directory to ada examples (using the thin bindings)? I would like to port the examples but I'm a one-person operation so this would take extra time, especially since I still struggle to decipher C. (The FORTRAN examples are easier for me to read so maybe I would use them as a starting point.) I would use the thick bindings, however, because I'm afraid that many Ada programmers would look at the examples written using the thin bindings and keep looking elsewhere for a plotter. For example, the argument lists for the thick binding are frequently shorter because it is not necessary to pass array dimensions. Does the PLplot distribution policy absolutely require that the examples be included with the binding? Jerry Thanks, Werner Jerry wrote: Hi all, My name is Jerry Bauck and I just joined this list after having been on the plplot_general list for a while. I hope this is an appropriate posting. I was delighted to find PLplot some months ago after getting some feeling for what is available in the way of high-quality plotters. I have made both thick and thin bindings to PLplot in Ada. The thick binding contains a number of high-level procedures for super-easy use in making plots and manipulating the color tables, among other things. I didn't know C and was just learning Ada when I started this so needless to say it has been entertaining. I made a fat swath initially with a few lines of regex (which I also did not know) and the rest was just rolling up my sleeves and getting to work (plus a little help from the folks at comp.lang.ada). I'd like to know if there is any interest in including these bindings with the PLplot distribution. The source code and some graphical examples may be examined at http://homepage.mac.com/oscarruitt/plplotinada/plplot_ada.html Thanks, Jerry
Re: [Plplot-devel] Ada bindings
Jerry wrote (earlier): I'd like to know if there is any interest in including these bindings with the PLplot distribution. Hi Jerry: Yes, there is some interest assuming you are willing to donate your code under our preferred license which is the LGPL. We would need e-mail stating that from you before we could accept your donation. Furthermore, it's important for you to give us enough detailed information to build the interface and examples for ourselves (see below) since I believe our current Ada expertise is pretty low. On 2006-12-20 17:46-0700 Jerry wrote: On Dec 20, 2006, at 4:50 AM, Werner Smekal wrote: Could you provide a cookbook what is needed to make the bindings work (for persons who never used ada)? I can provide a help file or readme although compiling sources and linking libraries is just the usual stuff. Command line usage requires compiling your main Ada program, assuming the sources are in your search paths. Compiling Ada is quite easy because every Ada package must specify everything it needs, thus simplifying the build process. Compiling a multi-file program is done by simply directing the compiler to compile the main program. The Ada compiler that is included with gcc is especially easy to invoke, as I understand (not having used any others). After compiling, you tell the linker where the PLplot library is and you're done. Werner had an excellent question here. We could probably figure out how to build the Ada interface from the general description you give above and reading some of the Ada documentation, but to make it easy for all our developers who have never used Ada (such as me) could you please provide a step by step cookbook of the exact commands (command-line much preferred over GUI commands) we should use to build the interface for those with access to your platform (OS X)? Once we had those, it should be straightforward to integrate those instructions into our CMake build system so that the interface could be easily built on all platforms. And would it also possible for you to port the examples which you can find in the examples directory to ada examples (using the thin bindings)? I would like to port the examples but I'm a one-person operation so this would take extra time, especially since I still struggle to decipher C. (The FORTRAN examples are easier for me to read so maybe I would use them as a starting point.) I would use the thick bindings, however, because I'm afraid that many Ada programmers would look at the examples written using the thin bindings and keep looking elsewhere for a plotter. For example, the argument lists for the thick binding are frequently shorter because it is not necessary to pass array dimensions. Does the PLplot distribution policy absolutely require that the examples be included with the binding? Again, Werner brought up an important point. Showing that the standard set of examples in the language of choice produces the same postscript results as the C examples is an excellent test of that language interface. Thus, an interface is not really considered to be first class until all the standard examples are implemented with results compared with the C results for the standard examples. That said, if your initial donation included just a few of the standard examples, that would encourage us to do the integration work with our CMake build system with the understanding that you would be willing to fill in more standard examples as time permitted. Furthermore, the exposure your interface got with PLplot might inspire others to help you out with that task even if they didn't know Ada to start since it should be straightforward to infer what the source code should be for additional Ada examples once we see the required language syntax in the examples that you supply. I suggest you use the f95 examples as the template for your initial subset of the standard examples in ada. That interface (like most of our high-level interfaces) has all redundant dimension information dropped so that sounds most compatible with your thick ada interface to PLplot. 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); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __ Linux-powered Science __ - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash
[Plplot-devel] Bug Tracker
I noticed that the Bug tracker has some outdated entries, who is responsible for maintaining the bug database? - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
