On 2017-10-02 15:35-0000 Philippe STRAUSS via Plplot-devel wrote:
Hello plplot devs, I'm an ocaml user using plplot in one of my pet project.The plcairo layer seems not usable anymore, what happened?
Hi Philippe: Thanks very much for your interest in plcairo. To answer your question above, I have reviewed the situation with git blame and git log and the fundamental answer is the last two commits by Hezekiah Carty before he took at least a temporary break from developing PLplot in 2014 is he switched from the cairo to cairo2 OCaml module (commit 84d2a85) and followed up (commit e88308c) by changing our OCaml documentation in presumably a compatible way with that change. Commit 84d2a85 was a substantial change, and here is the associated commit message: commit 84d2a859f31b69c1d440a7a61d5c57528de94355 Author: Hezekiah M. Carty <h...@0ok.org> Date: Thu Jul 3 14:46:13 2014 +0000 Switch to a different OCaml Cairo binding ("cairo2" in opam) This is a more actively maintained binding to the Cairo library. It is unfortunately not packaged for Debian at this time so interested users would need to install the library through opam. opam is generally the recommended way to install and manage OCaml libraries (this cpan, pip, etc) so this isn't a particularly serious limitation. svn path=/trunk/; revision=13134 So the situation is I cannot test plcairo on our principal testing platform (my Debian Jessie box), I am not even sure cairo2 will be available once I upgrade that box to Debian Stretch, and despite Hez's thought that opam might be the answer, I am reluctant to potentially mess up my Debian installation with an opam installation on top of that. Since we are stuck now and possibly in the forseeable future with regard to testing plcairo and because Hez continues to be out of touch, I ultimately decided to disable this capability (see commits 893625c and 84760038). However, the net effect of those two changes was extremely small so it should be absolutely straightforward to resurrect plcairo again. For example, you could do that by reversing those two particular commits. So given this background what do you recommend on the cairo versus cairo2 question, and in particular do you know whether there is an official Debian package that provides that cairo2 module? Another possibility is I could go back to cairo from cairo2 by reversing Hez's last two commits, but that would be a substantial change so I would only do that if you recommend cairo over cairo2 these days. Yet another possibility would be for PLplot to support an untested (by me) cairo2 version plus a tested cairo version, but from the size of commit 84d2a859f3 that would be a fair amount of work to implement.
I have some spare time to tackle the issue under guidance in case. I
use plplot embedded in a gtk windows from within ocaml like the xgtk_interface example. I have ocaml cairo and cairo2 bindings. regards. Sounds good! It appears by reversing my two small commits that you might be in business with cairo2 right away, but regardless of that I would appreciate the cairo/cairo2 advice I requested from you above, and I would certainly be willing to help you with any CMake issues you encounter and also apply your requested patches (if I have some convenient way to test them). Best wishes, 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