[I'm posting this to the maintainers list because I'd like to see some
additional feedback about this issue before deciding what to
do. --jwe]
On 9-Feb-2006, David Bateman wrote:
| The DEFVAR's in
| __gnuplot_raw__.cc just need to be moved from __gnuplot_init__ to
| somewhere else that is called at startup. This makes sense to me as
| things like automatic_replot can probably be used by other plotters
than
| gnuplot.
Originally, there was a PKG_ADD line that ran __gnuplot_init__. But
that means that the gnuplot code is loaded even when it is not needed.
So I removed it, which caused part of the current bug. We currently
have the following DEFVARs in __gnuplot_raw__.l:
DEFVAR (automatic_replot, true, automatic_replot,
DEFVAR (gnuplot_binary, GNUPLOT_BINARY, gnuplot_binary,
DEFVAR (gnuplot_command_plot, "pl", gnuplot_command_plot,
DEFVAR (gnuplot_command_replot, "rep", gnuplot_command_replot,
DEFVAR (gnuplot_command_splot, "sp", gnuplot_command_splot,
DEFVAR (gnuplot_command_using, "u", gnuplot_command_using,
DEFVAR (gnuplot_command_with, "w", gnuplot_command_with,
DEFVAR (gnuplot_command_axes, "ax", gnuplot_command_axes,
DEFVAR (gnuplot_command_title, "t", gnuplot_command_title,
DEFVAR (gnuplot_command_end, "\n", gnuplot_command_end,
DEFVAR (gnuplot_use_title_option, octave_env::have_x11_display (),
Should all of these go in another file that is always loaded? If we
do that, then do we have to do that for every package that wants to
define some built-in variables?
Is it reasonable to ask users to load the gnuplot library before using
the variables that are defined in that file? Probably by doing
something like
gnuplot_init ();
gnuplot_binary = "/my/gnuplot";
This would be similar to
(require 'gnuplot)
(setq gnuplot_binary "/my/gnuplot")
in Emacs or importing a module in Python. I know, this is not very
Matlab-like, but I think it would solve the problem.
Or, we could even introduce a "require" function, so that
require ("PKG");
checks for a __PKG_init__ function, and executes it if it is
available.
Comments?
jwe