Re: moving toward a 3.0 release

[Quentin Spencer]

Bill Denney wrote:
> David Bateman wrote:
> > So would you be willing to try to write a backend? Do you know of
> > someone who would? How long do you estimate the time needed (taking into
> > account that this is a volunteer project) to write such a backend? Sorry
> > to be direct, but these need to be answered so that John can fix the
> > feature freeze date.
> At this point, I can't really volunteer to write a backend.  I really 
> just don't have the time to work on it.
>
> I think that octaviz and octplot would probably work for the backend.

These are both promising, but in the short term, gnuplot is the only 
thing that already supports 2D and 3D plots (and images with the 
upcoming 4.2), is already available in all of the distributions, and 
compiles without any trouble. I recently decided try octaviz and I 
finally gave up after wasting a lot of time trying to compile it against 
the latest VTK.

I would be willing to help out with a gnuplot backend, but I can't 
promise all that much time. I think adopting a common front end like 
what Bill has proposed would go a long way to encouraging all of the 
people with an interest in improving octave's graphics to start really 
working on it.


Quentin