Hi Phil: On 2013-05-21 05:14-0700 phil rosenberg wrote:
> Thanks Alan You are welcome. I am glad my idea worked. > I commented out the building of pltek and found the same problem when building the examples so as you said it was nothing to do with pltek, but a fundamental build issue. The fix you suggested worked. I missed that flag when looking at the wiki, I tried every other cairo flag on there! > On the linux build section of the wiki I've added a troubleshooting section and added this to it. Maybe this would be a useful place to document little things like this as and when people come across them. Good idea. The principal thing to remember about PLplot configuration is that the result of all CMake option commands plus a lot more information is documented in the CMake cache file (i.e., the CMakeCache.txt file in the top-level directory of the build tree). So for the present case, if you looked in there, you would see zillions of cairo related device variables, i.e., //Enable epscairo device PLD_epscairo:BOOL=ON So you could have turned all those off by hand, with -DPLD_epscairo=OFF -DPLD_pscairo=OFF .... But if you had looked further in that cache file you might have spotted //Disable all cairo devices by default (ON) or enable cairo devices // individually by default (OFF) DEFAULT_NO_CAIRO_DEVICES:BOOL=OFF I had an advantage because I vaguely recalled implementing something like that years ago as a convenience because it was so difficult to remember all cairo devices to turn them off individually with -DPLD_epscairo=OFF -DPLD_pscairo=OFF .... So a quick check of my own CMakeCache.txt file allowed me to find DEFAULT_NO_CAIRO_DEVICES so that I could suggest trying -DDEFAULT_NO_CAIRO_DEVICES:BOOL=ON to you. (BTW, there is a similar convenience option to turn off all qt devices as well if anyone here ever runs into build trouble with the qt devices.) <aside> Personally, I have never seen the business/science appeal of the "enterprise" Linux distributions, but RedHat has clearly found a lucrative market for such a distro (businessman and scientists who feel computers should be unchanging toasters so there is some sort of guarantee of no new features with the only change being some bug fixing of really old software versions). Obviously RedHat have built up a large business based on that market. But I can't help thinking the businesses/scientists that use such Linux distros are cheating themselves; they are perpetually behind the best Linux features by three to four years (as you discovered with those old pango/cairo libraries which were missing some important API that has been part of modern versions of those libraries for a long time). And when the business or science institutions do get the courage to upgrade to a newer version of an enterprise distro it is a huge change for their employees and users with a large training cost to deal with that large change. I think dealing with more continuous Linux change half a year or so behind the Linux cutting edge would be a lot more cost effective. Which is why I personally use Debian testing (currently called wheezy but once wheezy is released as a stable version I will move on to the next Debian testing version). Debian testing is a rolling (perpetually upgraded) distribution that is being constantly bug fixed as a result of bug reports from Debian testing users, but which has had the worst of the bugs worked out already by bug reports from courageous users who use Debian unstable (a rolling distribution right on the cutting edge of Linux development). I think the RedHat "fedora" distribution is a similar concept to Debian unstable, but I assume that is too near the cutting edge for most institutions. I am not sure whether RedHat offers anything like Debian testing where you get a nice compromise between the latest new Linux features and bug fixing. </aside> 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. 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