Hi Jim: Could you clarify the purpose of the -mfi and -mfo options and the plreadmetafile routine?
It appears the options simply set metafile input and output file names without doing anything else contrary to their self documentation in src/plargs.c of "Read the specified PLplot metafile" and "Write the plot to the specified PLplot metafile". The only potential actual use of mf_infile I can find within the source tree is in plreadmetafile. That function appears to do something similar to plrender, and it is only used in examples/c/test_plbuf.c with an explicit name rather than NULL so the result is mf_infile is just a placeholder (i.e., never actually used in our current source tree). By the way, if my interpretation of the purpose of plreadmetafile is correct, can plrender simply call plreadmetafile (with an explicit name for the plmeta file as read from the command line) to allow removal of a lot of (redundant) code from plrender? I can also find no actual use of mf_outfile anywhere in the source tree. So this appears to be a placeholder as well. Since we are in deep freeze now, we should leave these placeholders in place for this release and not mess with plrender, but post-release (or on a topic branch now), you should remove these options or actually use them for something (with better documentation strings such as "Set an input plmetafile name" and "Set an output plmetafile name"), and you might also wish to call plreadmetafile from plrender (if my above interpretation of the purpose of plreadmetafile is correct). 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
