I have made the official announcement concerning the PLplot-5.12.0 release on the plplot-general list, and I thank all of you who helped during this last release cycle (with the total number of commits near 400!) to create and test this release.
Obviously, the push freeze required for the release has now been removed so I highly encourage all of you to mature your various development topics and (for official developers) push them to SF master or (for other developers) create a patch or patches concerning your topic using "git format-patch" (see README.developers) and send that patch (or patches) to this list as a compressed attachment for review. What a mental relief to get this 5.12.0 release done! I am especially proud of the work I did late in the release cycle of rewriting large parts of the DocBook documentation for this release. The issue that I discovered time and again (with some outstanding exceptions such as the Ada and Fortran documentation) was a lot of that documentation had been written in the early 90's and therefore had little relevance any more. Even after all of that large rewriting effort (which was equivalent to rewriting much of a 300-page [!] technical book), there is still more to be done. So our documentation is likely still the weakest part of PLplot and the largest barrier to adoption by new users. So _please_ if you care about attracting new PLplot users (which you should do since that is where help for the next generation of PLplot will be coming from) look over the rewritten documentation (at <http://plplot.sourceforge.net/documentation.php>), and if you spot any remaining issues (especially any obviously dated chapters) please go ahead and update the relevant file in doc/docbook/src and push the result or circulate the patch here as appropriate. For my initial development work for this release cycle I plan to try to solve the remaining Linux inefficiency issues for wxwidgets. (I am giving top PLplot priority to that development topic because I think once those Linux inefficiency issues are completely solved, then our wxwidgets device will start competing with our other two high-quality interactive devices (cairo and qt) and could potentially attract a lot of new Linux wxwidgets users to PLplot.) Furthermore, if that development topic is a success, I plan to create a bug-fix release (5.12.1) containing that fix, any additional fixes concerning wxwidgets that Phil and Pedro come up with, and any other PLplot bug fixes that are made between now and then. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
