On 2016-03-02 07:53-0000 Arjen Markus wrote: > Hi Alan, > > > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Alan W. Irwin [mailto:ir...@beluga.phys.uvic.ca] >> Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2016 1:20 AM >> To: PLplot development list >> Subject: [Plplot-devel] Deprecation of the MinGW/MSYS platform >> >> For a variety of reasons discussed below I think it is time (unless someone >> strongly >> objects) for us to deprecate the MinGW/MSYS in favour of MinGW-w64/MSYS2 >> and other Windows alternatives. >> >> One advantage MinGW/MSYS can still claim is libraries such as PLplot built >> on that >> platform are native Windows libraries and do not depend on any special dll >> such as >> the Cygwin dll that is a required dependency for all software built on >> Cygwin. But >> that advantage is no longer unique to MinGW/MSYS because MinGW-w64/MSYS2 >> (a completely independent project with different developers than the ones >> who are >> still supporting MinGW/MSYS) shares that same advantage. >>
> I am not completely sure that programs built with MinGW-w64/MSYS2 are indeed independent of an installation of this platform. At least they are not for a default build. I checked this with one of the C examples: it requires LIBWINPTHREAD-1.DLL and LIBSHP-1.DLL (it seems to be from the Shapelib library, so not a system DLL) to be present in the path (of course you can include these in the PLplot distribution). Hi Arjen: Sorry, I did not state what I meant very clearly. There is no doubt that distributions of free software such as Cygwin and MinGW-w64/MSYS2 provide free libraries that are soft dependencies of PLplot such as the pthread, shapelib, and qhull libraries; the Qt4 suite of libraries, the Pango/Cairo subset of the GTK+ suite of libraries, wxWidgets, etc. The availability of those free libraries _with a uniform ABI_ (i.e., all compiled with exactly the same compiler) is what makes PLplot so powerful on those platforms. But the distinction I was trying to make between Cygwin and MinGW-w64/MSYS2 is the former also requires an additional (fairly large) dll called cygwin.dll as a PLplot library dependency while the latter has no such "special" dll dependency requirement. > It might be a good idea to find out if the reference to LIBWINPTHREAD-1.DLL can be eliminated via a static version of that library. Then I think the program will be entirely independent of the MinGW-w64 installation. A first glance at the available static libraries indicates that this is not impossible. It will be a matter of finding the right compile/link switches. If you link PLplot libraries with the static versions of all the different MinGW-w64/MSYS2 libraries that are required for a powerful PLplot, then you _could_ indeed distribute that powerful result independent of MinGW-w64/MSYS2. But I would advise you not to do that because of all the security concerns implied by binary distribution. For example, PLplot's reputation is not going to be enhanced if we by accident (because of an undetected security intrusion on the machine where we are building the binary version of PLplot) end up distributing an attack vector to all users' machines. And this is true of all platforms and not just Windows. Therefore, I feel the proper way to deal with the inherent security issues for binary distribution is to let official distributions of free software handle that headache. So I am pleased that Orion is packaging PLplot for Fedora, Andrew is doing the same thing on Debian (and indirectly on Debian derivatives such as Ubuntu). Similarly, there are PLplot packaging efforts on most other Linux distributions, the principal Mac OS X distributions Fink, MacPorts, and Homebrew, and also the principal *BSD variants, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. In contrast to that situation, my understanding is that both the Cygwin and MinGW-w64/MSYS2 platforms do not currently distribute PLplot. To fix those important issues we need someone with access to those two platforms to become a packager for each of them. Would you be willing to take on those two additional important roles? I think that would be a time-consuming effort to start for you, but after that required initial burst of activity, I don't think it would take a major effort to maintain the Cygwin and MinGW-w64/MSYS2 packages for PLplot going forward. If it turns out you are interested in becoming the PLplot packager for either/both those distributions, I think the next steps would be to query the Cygwin and MSYS2 mailing lists to find out exact details of how to become a packager of PLplot for those two distributions. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=272487151&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
