Re: [Plplot-devel] Status of Tcl and friends

2013-11-14 Thread Arjen Markus
Hi Alan, Maurice,

running the Tk part of PLplot is a new experience for me, but it is running now 
on
Windows/Cygwin. Drawing is rather slow and I had to adapt the pkgIndex.tcl file 
for
the Cygwin platform, but it is working, including such things as Save/As and 
Orient/90
and Zoom - the latter produce the plot very fast, whereas otherwise I can see 
the
plot being built up.

With this going, I am in a position to check the open issues.

Regards,

Arjen

> -Original Message-
> From: Arjen Markus [mailto:arjen.mar...@deltares.nl]
> Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2013 8:17 AM
> To: Alan W. Irwin; PLplot development list
> Subject: Re: [Plplot-devel] Status of Tcl and friends
>
> Hi Alan,
>
> yes, I have seen the various commit messsages. Many thanks for this work!
>
> I will have a look at the color issues and the hack in tkdemos.
>
> Meanwhile, I have been looking at the Pltk issue - mainly to see how I can 
> reproduce
> it.
> So far, I have not succeeded with this. I can try in three different ways:
> - Using Cygwin
> - Using one of the Linux machines I have access to (none running Debian)
> - Using a virtual machine running Debian The latter is perhaps the most 
> direct way,
> but it is also the most demanding one.
>
> Anyway I hope to make some progress with that this week.
>
> I will also get rid of the "TclFormatInt" issue today.
>

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Re: [Plplot-devel] Question from comp.lang.ada user about thread safety

2013-11-14 Thread Andrew Ross
On Wednesday 13 Nov 2013 09:28:02 Hezekiah M. Carty wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Jerry  wrote:
> > I posted an announcement some time back on comp.lang.ada. about the latest
> > PLplot release. (FWIW, it currently has 182 views, and I got some useful
> > feedback from the Ada gurus.)
> > 
> > Today this post (below) appeared. I don't know how to answer his question
> > about thread safety. Any thoughts?
> > 
> > Jerry
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Hi Jerry,
> > 
> > That looks really interesting.
> > 
> > I'm looking for a plotter routine that could be used safely inside the AWS
> > [= Ada Web Server] web server, so I can implement a 'callback' chart
> > server (currently I have one written in Java).
> > 
> > Could this be used for that? Some simple tests suggest to me that it isn't
> > thread safe. The  Initialize_PLplot [aka plinit] and associated
> > procedures to set filenames, etc, seem to set global variables somewhere.
> > Is there some trick I'm missing?
> > 
> > It does make lovely looking charts.
> > 
> > thanks very much for this.
> > 
> > Graham
> 
> PLplot is not thread safe.  While you can use PLplot in a threaded
> program, only one thread per process may interact with PLplot at a
> given time.  This limitation holds even if you are working with
> multiple plot streams in a single process.
> 
> Regarding Alan's follow-up - while it is possible to make PLplot
> thread-safe, the changes required are invasive and pervasive.  They
> are all good changes to make!  But there is a lot to be done and the
> result is a completely backwards-incompatible API.  The three big
> pieces required are:
> 
> a) All PLplot functions will need to explicitly operate on a given
> plstream value representing the affected plot stream.  This requires
> adding an additional stream argument to all PLplot functions and
> removing any global state from plot streams.
> b) Remove all of the globals used through the PLplot code base in the
> actual plotting logic.  One example is the contour/shading routines
> which use several global variables to track their state.
> c) Confirm/ensure that each of our output devices can be and are used
> in a thread-safe manner.
> 
> Each of these big pieces is made up of several smaller chunks.  (a) is
> where the API breakage would come in.  It is also likely the simplest
> (simple being relative here!) to complete.  (b) could be pretty hairy
> as the logic in the contouring routines in particular is tricky to
> translate to something which doesn't use globals.  (c) should be
> attainable for at least the Cairo, Qt and built-in output drivers
> (SVG, PS, null).  I would be happy to help in putting together a plan
> for this work.  Unfortunately my PLplot time is very limited these
> days so it's unlikely I'll be able to provide much development
> assistance.


I'd concur with what Hez said, however there is one further source of thread 
problems - namely a number of the language bindings use globals to work round 
passing things like function pointers between languages. This would also need 
checking.

This would be a useful, but substantive job.

In terms of security we try to follow best practice in terms of checking buffer 
lengths, avoiding insecure library calls etc to avoid the obvious problems. 
Newer versions of gcc / gnu ld are getting better at flagging some of these. 
There is certainly no systematic attempt to harden plplot or fully check it 
for potential security issues.

Andrew





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Re: [Plplot-devel] Matwrapped octave and f77 cleanups that should be done now

2013-11-14 Thread Andrew Ross
On Tuesday 12 Nov 2013 18:13:15 Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> To Andrew and Arjen:
> 
> The forthcoming 5.9.11 release that I have tentatively scheduled for
> year's end is only ~7 weeks away so now would be an excellent time to
> do the cleanups I discuss below.
> 
> @Andrew: Do you agree that the octave bindings that are generated with
> the ENABLE_matwrapped_octave=ON option are no longer useful?  If so,
> would you be willing to take responsibility for completely removing
> that brand of octave bindings to simplify our build system and also to
> get rid of some files that are only useful in the matwrapped case?

Agreed. The new swig generated versions should be more maintainable, and seem 
to work just as well so I see no reason to keep the old version.

> @Arjen: We made a plan early in the 5.9.10 release cycle
> (i.e., something like two years ago) to completely eliminate f77 two
> (development) releases after 5.9.10 came out. Users who were following
> svn trunk should have been well aware of this plan (since f77 was
> disabled by default) for those two years.  On the other hand, our more
> typical users were only informed of this plan as of the release of
> 5.9.10.
> 
> My current release manager thinking is 5.9.11 will come out near the
> end of this year and 5.10.0 a month or less later with nothing but
> bug-fixing changes from 5.9.11 to the release of 5.10.0.  So our
> publicized plan for the complete removal of f77 corresponds to the
> release of 5.11.0 (assuming we continue with the odd minor numbers to
> designated development releases) some time in the middle of 2014.
> That's a relatively long time from now, and, in any case, I prefer
> cleanups like this to occur before stable releases to help simplify
> that stable release.  Therefore, I think we should go ahead and do the
> complete removal of f77 now.  I suspect there is now zero interest in
> f77 which, after all, is a 3-decade old standard.  Furthermore, we
> certainly received no complaints about disabling f77 by default during
> this last release cycle or since the release of 5.9.10.  So if you
> agree it is time for the complete removal of the f77 bindings and
> examples, I am willing to do the work in the next few days.

For what it is worth, I'd agree with this also. Getting true f77 compilers is 
becoming harder. Gfortran have already dropped their explicit support for the 
f77 standard (via the -std=f77 option), although the code will likely still 
compile.

Andrew 

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Re: [Plplot-devel] Matwrapped octave and f77 cleanups that should be done now

2013-11-14 Thread Andrew Ross
On Thursday 14 Nov 2013 12:32:30 Andrew Ross wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 Nov 2013 18:13:15 Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> > To Andrew and Arjen:
> > 
> > The forthcoming 5.9.11 release that I have tentatively scheduled for
> > year's end is only ~7 weeks away so now would be an excellent time to
> > do the cleanups I discuss below.
> > 
> > @Andrew: Do you agree that the octave bindings that are generated with
> > the ENABLE_matwrapped_octave=ON option are no longer useful?  If so,
> > would you be willing to take responsibility for completely removing
> > that brand of octave bindings to simplify our build system and also to
> > get rid of some files that are only useful in the matwrapped case?
> 
> Agreed. The new swig generated versions should be more maintainable, and
> seem to work just as well so I see no reason to keep the old version.

Now removed.

Andrew

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[Plplot-devel] Display problems when running "wish wish_standard_examples"

2013-11-14 Thread Alan W. Irwin
Hi Arjen:

I have just (revision 12702) finished implementing the
test_wish_standard_examples target which invokes the
"wish_standard_examples" configured script to test all the standard
examples under wish taking advantage of the PLplot TEA capabilities.
So as a result of this commit and a previous commit where I did a
similar implementation for the corresponding tclsh case, then you get
essentially complete testing of the Tcl, Tk, Itcl, Itk, and Iwidgets
PLplot capabilities by simply running "make test_interactive".

The only exception to this complete testing that I am aware of is the
runAlldemos.tcl script mentioned in examples/tk/README.tkdemos.  Since
that test also works for the most part when you try it by hand, I
strongly encourage you to add a test target to run runAlldemos.tcl
similar to the revision 12702 commit (where that commit essentially
demonstrates everything you have to do to create such a test target).

Note the test_wish_standard_examples target currently has display
issues that have been discussed in the commit message for revision
12702. Those issues for this test target (or if you run either "wish
wish_standard_examples" or

wish
% source wish_standard_examples

) are that the display of the plots are missing although all the
examples run as evidenced by the usual stdout results from example
23) without error messages or non-zero return codes.

My wish and X setup cannot be the issue here.  For example, the following 
simple script

button .hello -text "Hello, World!" -command { exit }
pack .hello

creates a widget that displays and works for me when the filename is
mentioned as a wish argument or sourced from inside a wish
environment.  But if I do everything I can to the configured
wish_standard_examples script (rename it to
wish_standard_examples.tcl, get rid of all the leading magic
commentary that is there to make it possible to run the command as a
standalone script) to make it as identical as possible to the simple
one above, the display issue continues. The one exception where
everything works (plots are displayed with no errors) is if I cut and
paste the contents of wish_standard_examples to a wish environment by
hand, e.g.,

wish
lappend auto_path /home/software/plplot_svn/HEAD/build_dir/bindings/tk-x-plat 
/home/software/plplot_svn/HEAD/build_dir/bindings/tk
package require Pltk
source tkdemos.tcl
# disable pauses
$plwin cmd plspause 0
0
1
#2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11


Clearly cutting and pasting is not required to get the above two-line
test to work on my platform (as expected).  So I am pretty sure the
display issue for the test_wish_standard_examples target or when
running "wish wish_standard_examples" is caused by something slightly
wrong with the way that tkdemos.tcl initializes the Tk display
environment when it is invoked from a wish environment.

So this issue is something to keep in mind as you look at the current
"horrible hack" in tkdemos.tcl to distinguish between plserver and
wish invocations.

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).
__

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Re: [Plplot-devel] Status of Tcl and friends

2013-11-14 Thread Alan W. Irwin
On 2013-11-14 12:18- Arjen Markus wrote:

> Hi Alan, Maurice,
>
> running the Tk part of PLplot is a new experience for me, but it is running 
> now on
> Windows/Cygwin. Drawing is rather slow and I had to adapt the pkgIndex.tcl 
> file for
> the Cygwin platform, but it is working, including such things as Save/As and 
> Orient/90
> and Zoom - the latter produce the plot very fast, whereas otherwise I can see 
> the
> plot being built up.
>
> With this going, I am in a position to check the open issues.

Excellent news, indeed!

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
__

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Re: [Plplot-devel] Question from comp.lang.ada user about thread safety

2013-11-14 Thread Jerry

On Nov 14, 2013, at 5:28 AM, Andrew Ross  
wrote:

> On Wednesday 13 Nov 2013 09:28:02 Hezekiah M. Carty wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Jerry  wrote:
>>> I posted an announcement some time back on comp.lang.ada. about the latest
>>> PLplot release. (FWIW, it currently has 182 views, and I got some useful
>>> feedback from the Ada gurus.)
>>> 
>>> Today this post (below) appeared. I don't know how to answer his question
>>> about thread safety. Any thoughts?
>>> 
>>> Jerry
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Hi Jerry,
>>> 
>>> That looks really interesting.
>>> 
>>> I'm looking for a plotter routine that could be used safely inside the AWS
>>> [= Ada Web Server] web server, so I can implement a 'callback' chart
>>> server (currently I have one written in Java).
>>> 
>>> Could this be used for that? Some simple tests suggest to me that it isn't
>>> thread safe. The  Initialize_PLplot [aka plinit] and associated
>>> procedures to set filenames, etc, seem to set global variables somewhere.
>>> Is there some trick I'm missing?
>>> 
>>> It does make lovely looking charts.
>>> 
>>> thanks very much for this.
>>> 
>>> Graham
>> 
>> PLplot is not thread safe.  While you can use PLplot in a threaded
>> program, only one thread per process may interact with PLplot at a
>> given time.  This limitation holds even if you are working with
>> multiple plot streams in a single process.
>> 
>> Regarding Alan's follow-up - while it is possible to make PLplot
>> thread-safe, the changes required are invasive and pervasive.  They
>> are all good changes to make!  But there is a lot to be done and the
>> result is a completely backwards-incompatible API.  The three big
>> pieces required are:
>> 
>> a) All PLplot functions will need to explicitly operate on a given
>> plstream value representing the affected plot stream.  This requires
>> adding an additional stream argument to all PLplot functions and
>> removing any global state from plot streams.
>> b) Remove all of the globals used through the PLplot code base in the
>> actual plotting logic.  One example is the contour/shading routines
>> which use several global variables to track their state.
>> c) Confirm/ensure that each of our output devices can be and are used
>> in a thread-safe manner.
>> 
>> Each of these big pieces is made up of several smaller chunks.  (a) is
>> where the API breakage would come in.  It is also likely the simplest
>> (simple being relative here!) to complete.  (b) could be pretty hairy
>> as the logic in the contouring routines in particular is tricky to
>> translate to something which doesn't use globals.  (c) should be
>> attainable for at least the Cairo, Qt and built-in output drivers
>> (SVG, PS, null).  I would be happy to help in putting together a plan
>> for this work.  Unfortunately my PLplot time is very limited these
>> days so it's unlikely I'll be able to provide much development
>> assistance.
> 
> 
> I'd concur with what Hez said, however there is one further source of thread 
> problems - namely a number of the language bindings use globals to work round 
> passing things like function pointers between languages. This would also need 
> checking.
> 
> This would be a useful, but substantive job.
> 
> In terms of security we try to follow best practice in terms of checking 
> buffer 
> lengths, avoiding insecure library calls etc to avoid the obvious problems. 
> Newer versions of gcc / gnu ld are getting better at flagging some of these. 
> There is certainly no systematic attempt to harden plplot or fully check it 
> for potential security issues.
> 
> Andrew
> 
Thanks, Andrew.
Jerry
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Re: [Plplot-devel] Display problems when running "wish wish_standard_examples"

2013-11-14 Thread Alan W. Irwin
Hi Arjen:

I forgot to mention that the configured wish_standard_examples(.in)
script comments out some of the examples for the reasons given in the
script.  But if you wanted to look (say) at the color issues (which I
strongly encourage you to put on your agenda), then locally uncomment
examples 2 and 24 (and for speed comment out all the other examples)
in wish_standard_examples.in. After such a change, then re-running
"make test_wish_standard_examples" in the build tree will
automatically re-run cmake to reconfigure wish_standard_examples in
the build tree with all your script changes, recompile any source
files you have changed that are direct or indirect dependencies of the
test, and then finally run that configured script. (By the way, feel
free to modify wish_standard_examples.in (and other such interactive
configured scripts that test some aspect of Tcl and friends) to have a
configured option to greatly reduce the number of examples that are
run in the interest of speed.  That option would be especially useful
for your case where Tk on Cygwin is so slow.

Anyhow, once you get the hang of working with these simple test
targets that are set up with CMake's add_custom_command and
add_custom_target commands, they are a real convenience for
development and continued testing afterward to guard against bit rot.

By the way, "bit rot" is a term I heard once from Maurice many years
ago which I liked very much at the time, and which I have continued to
use since. I define this term to refer to the case when the
assumptions of a particular software unit that is unmaintained
inevitably begin to no longer be true because of changes in other
software.  (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rot and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot for more general
definitions.)

So what I have been doing for the last week or so is dealing with bit
rot that we have allowed to accumulate for the last decade in the Tcl,
Tk, Itcl, Itk, and Iwidgets components of the PLplot build system and
code.  In the future if we are careful with designing sufficiently
general tests, then we can deal with each Tcl, etc., bit-rot issue
immediately as revealed by the tests rather than waiting for a
decade's worth of such bit-rot issues to accumulate.

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
__

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Re: [Plplot-devel] Display problems when running "wish wish_standard_examples"

2013-11-14 Thread Arjen Markus
Hi Alan,

I will have a look at these issues. I am rather pleased that Cygwin is working 
nicely
for me now, even though there are a few idiosyncracies to avoid. The most 
perplexing
of these was that at some point I had to kill the wish process and that also 
killed the
Cygwin shell, so that I ended up in an ordinary DOS-box. I do not know how to 
reproduce
that situation and, honestly, I do not care to ;).

Anyway, I like the idea of making PLplot easier to use from a Tcl and Tk 
environment.

Regards,

Arjen

> -Original Message-
> From: Alan W. Irwin [mailto:ir...@beluga.phys.uvic.ca]
> Sent: Friday, November 15, 2013 6:27 AM
> To: Arjen Markus; PLplot development list
> Subject: Re: [Plplot-devel] Display problems when running "wish
> wish_standard_examples"
>
> Hi Arjen:
>
> I forgot to mention that the configured wish_standard_examples(.in) script 
> comments
> out some of the examples for the reasons given in the script.  But if you 
> wanted to
> look (say) at the color issues (which I strongly encourage you to put on your 
> agenda),
> then locally uncomment examples 2 and 24 (and for speed comment out all the 
> other
> examples) in wish_standard_examples.in. After such a change, then re-running
> "make test_wish_standard_examples" in the build tree will automatically re-run
> cmake to reconfigure wish_standard_examples in the build tree with all your 
> script
> changes, recompile any source files you have changed that are direct or 
> indirect
> dependencies of the test, and then finally run that configured script. (By 
> the way, feel
> free to modify wish_standard_examples.in (and other such interactive 
> configured
> scripts that test some aspect of Tcl and friends) to have a configured option 
> to greatly
> reduce the number of examples that are run in the interest of speed.  That 
> option
> would be especially useful for your case where Tk on Cygwin is so slow.
>
> Anyhow, once you get the hang of working with these simple test targets that 
> are set
> up with CMake's add_custom_command and add_custom_target commands, they
> are a real convenience for development and continued testing afterward to 
> guard
> against bit rot.
>
> By the way, "bit rot" is a term I heard once from Maurice many years ago 
> which I
> liked very much at the time, and which I have continued to use since. I 
> define this
> term to refer to the case when the assumptions of a particular software unit 
> that is
> unmaintained inevitably begin to no longer be true because of changes in other
> software.  (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rot and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot for more general
> definitions.)
>
> So what I have been doing for the last week or so is dealing with bit rot 
> that we have
> allowed to accumulate for the last decade in the Tcl, Tk, Itcl, Itk, and 
> Iwidgets
> components of the PLplot build system and code.  In the future if we are 
> careful with
> designing sufficiently general tests, then we can deal with each Tcl, etc., 
> bit-rot issue
> immediately as revealed by the tests rather than waiting for a decade's worth 
> of such
> bit-rot issues to accumulate.
>
> 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
> __

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