On 2009-03-26 13:53+0100 Werner Smekal wrote: > [...]Windows support is a big issue for me. I would like to stick to Linux > or Mac OS X for developing, but this is not the case and apart from > that I also think that it is important to not turn the back on 90% of > all developers/users. So Windows support is IMHO essential for > projects like plplot if we like it or not.
Hi Werner: This is an interesting topic in its own right so I have given it a new subject line. I agree with you about the importance of PLplot on Windows. Although I don't have access to Windows myself and never expect to try PLplot on that platform except possibly under Wine, there is no doubt there is a huge number of knowledgeable Windows developers who could potentially build PLplot for themselves. The key evidence that compelled me to this conclusion long ago was the SF statistics on MinGW downloads which are typically (http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=2435&ugn=mingw) 15000 to 20000 per day(!) However, the prospect of a huge potential market for Plplot is only part of why I think PLplot on Windows is important. There are positive network effects when groups of developers get together to work on a common project for multiple platforms. For example, our visibility support is used on all platforms and has received contributions from developers from all our platforms and similarly for our CMake-based build system. Given the huge potential market for PLplot on the windows side of things, I am a bit disappointed in the relatively few Windows users who appear to be taking advantage of PLplot (as roughly measured by the relatively small number of questions we get on plplot-general from those using PLplot on Windows platforms). I don't think that is our fault. Instead, because of all the PLplot driver dependencies, I think a more fundamental problem affecting PLplot on Windows is getting access to a consistently packaged set of free libraries. Obviously Cygwin attempts to respond to this need, but that is just one Windows distribution, and it cannot possibly satisfy everyone's needs/desires for consistently packaged free software on Windows. Contrast that with the Linux case where there are something like 500 different distributions all in healthy competition with each other to provide the best software packaging experience for users. Fortunately, CMake makes porting of free software to Windows platforms fairly straightforward. In fact, a project (see http://code.google.com/p/cmakeports/wiki/CMakePortsPlan) has recently been started to provide CMake-based build systems for those free software packages that have not yet created those on their own. One of the spin offs I hope to see from this project in the near future is one or more additional Windows distributions of free software based on MinGW and CMake that will give Cygwin some much-needed competition and also indirectly give PLplot a boost on Windows. Of course, the availability of the pango/cairo stack of libraries for Windows at http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html for the 7(!) cairo devices and the Qt4 stack of libraries for Windows at http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads for the 9(!) qt devices also gives a tremendous boost to PLplot on Windows. 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 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-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
