Hi Ludovic: I am going to answer you as well on the plplot-general mailing list because others may benefit from this answer.
Our FAQ is out of date; the last two updates were in 1995 and 2002. This doesn't hurt some sections of that FAQ that much, but other sections such as the build and test directions are so severely out of date that they are essential useless. In your e-mail you indicated a willingness to help with the PLplot documentation. That would be a big help since all PLplot developers are volunteers who work on it just in their spare time. Thus, if you (or other PLplot users here) send me an updated FAQ based on the instructions below (or updated documentation of any kind) I would generally be happy to commit it. Up-to-date build instructions are in our wiki. See http://www.miscdebris.net/plplot_wiki/index.php?title=Building_PLplot. Our wiki also has instructions for testing plplot, see http://www.miscdebris.net/plplot_wiki/index.php?title=Testing_PLplot. Those tests necessarily build and use all our examples so it is straightforward to infer (e.g., by looking at the installed examples Makefiles) exactly how to build any example or application against various important PLplot libraries. We also encourage all our users to contribute to the wiki if you spot anything out of date there. Note, the combined Makefile and pkg-config approach used to build and test the installed examples is useful for a lot of our users so we plan to maintain it indefinitely. However, some of our users prefer the more flexible approach of using CMake to build and test the installed examples so I am currently in the final stages of implementing that approach as an alternative and hope to present it (in fully documented form) soon. If you are using the svn version of PLplot now, you can try out this CMake-based installed examples build system by running "make install" as the final step of the core build. Then you should run cmake $prefix/share/plplot5.9.5/examples >& cmake.out (where $prefix is the installation prefix specified for the core build) in an initially empty build tree. Then run make test_noninteractive >& make_test_noninteractive.out and make test_interactive to build and thoroughly test both the noninteractive examples and the interactive examples. There are also many other useful targets in that build system (which you can discover by using "make help") for testing individual components of PLplot. You have access to exactly the same example build and test targets directly in the build tree (without a "make install" step first) if you use the -DBUILD_TEST=ON cmake option for the core build. Hope this helps. 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); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Plplot-general mailing list Plplot-general@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-general
