To get a feel for how popular PLplot is you should go to the file release area for 5.10.0 and click on the "Downloads/week" statistics menu item which allows you to change that statistic to any date range, plot download counts versus time, OS counts for a given time range, country of origin counts for a given time range, etc.
I have just done that, and it turns our there are ~8000 downloads of plplot-5.10.0 since its release 14 months ago. Binary use of PLplot on Linux and Mac OS X free software distributions is typically larger than that download statistic. Which means our efforts to get out the next release of plplot-5.11.0 has a very large potential audience. If you look at OS, Unknown + Linux is 50%, Windows is 43 per cent, Mac OS X is 7%, and the rest round to 0%. Mentally assigning Unknown to the Linux OS is probably a pretty safe assumption since Linux has so many different methods (e.g., wget, curl, sftp, and different browsers) you can use for downloads, and SF heuristics for determining OS likely assign Unknown OS to many of those download methods. But number 1 versus 2 doesn't really matter; the important point is both Linux and Windows are very important to us, and I am glad we have strong contingents of developers who support those platforms. The one obvious negative in those download statistics is the relative small fraction of PLplot users on Mac OS X even though that platform is used a lot (in my experience) by scientists. Perhaps binary use there is a lot higher than download+build use. But I would feel a lot better about the Mac OS X situation if, for example, we had comprehensive testing results for that platform supporting the idea that PLplot builds are a straightforward experience on that platform. If you look at country of origin, those downloads occurred for ~100 different countries (or ~60 different countries if you only count those with more than 10 downloads during the 14 months). China, Japan, India, Russia, and Korea are in the top 15 countries so I think the word is beginning to spread that our internationalization capabilities (i.e., the CTL [complex text layout] capabilities available for our cairo, qt, and svg device drivers) are working well for those who want to annotate their plots in their native language script. Anyhow, these download statistics for 5.10.0 provide a lot of food for thought and are a nice motivator for me to finish up the 5.11.0 release! 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BPM Camp - Free Virtual Workshop May 6th at 10am PDT/1PM EDT Develop your own process in accordance with the BPMN 2 standard Learn Process modeling best practices with Bonita BPM through live exercises http://www.bonitasoft.com/be-part-of-it/events/bpm-camp-virtual- event?utm_ source=Sourceforge_BPM_Camp_5_6_15&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=VA_SF _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
