On Feb 27, 2010, at 14:47 , Alan W. Irwin wrote: > On 2010-02-26 14:09-0800 David MacMahon wrote: > >> As you all know by now, I'm working on Ruby bindings to PLplot. I am >> (still) almost ready for a first release. There's always "a few more >> things"! :-) > > You may have done this already, but I highly recommend that you > implement > the standard set of 31 examples in ruby.
Yes, I am fairly far along with "porting" the examples to Ruby. There are a few rough edges, but I basically have examples 1-16, 18, 21-25 already working under Ruby. Example 17 is the strip chart one and I just haven't gotten to those functions yet. This is also the case for example 19 (the map functions). I am nearing completion of example 20 (plimage and plimagefr). I haven't started porting the rest, but I think examples 26,27,28 should be straightforward. I haven't done the time functions yet (haven't figured out how they relate to TAI, UTC, JD, etc.) so example 29 is still a TODO. I think examples 30 and 31 should be very easy once I get to them. > The test_diff_psc target (which is > a subset of the test_noninteractive target) has been implemented to > compare > Postscript results from all our official bindings with Postscript > results > from the standard C examples. This has proved to be a powerful > tool to > diagnose even subtle bugs in the bindings, but complete coverage of > the API > does require implementing the complete standard set of examples in > each set > of bindings. Sounds very useful! Thanks for bringing this to my attention. > The above suggestion pertains regardless of whether you are going > to donate > your ruby bindings to PLplot or not. I certainly plan on donating them, but I'm not sure the best channel. Ruby has an excellent package manager, RubyGems, that makes downloading and installing extensions very easy (provided the requisite libraries are already installed). I would like for people to be able simply to run "gem install plplot" to install the Ruby bindings to PLplot (again assuming they have the PLplot libraries already installed). This would be building upon the binary distros of PLplot (such as those that have been recently discussed on this list). This just means that I need to "publish" a "gem file" on one of the standard RubyGems distribution sites (formerly rubyforge.org, but I think now gemcutter.org), but it doesn't say anything about where the source code for the Ruby bindings will ultimately live. Right now the source code lives in a git repo (separate from my git svn clone of the PLplot Subversion repo) on my laptop, but clearly it needs to be moved elsewhere once the bindings are released. > After all, we can disable the ruby bindings by default until they > build and > test without issues, and thus they won't interfere with normal use of > PLplot. Furthermore, there will be plenty of opportunity for you > to send > patches in later to implement required bindings changes and add more > standard example implementations. In fact, I would positively > encourage > such maintenance. :-) Thanks for this encouragement! I still want to polish things up a little more before I release the Ruby bindings, but they are getting quite close to a releasable state. Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
