Re: Release Plans

[Ben Abbott]

On Sep 29, 2013, at 1:51 PM, Robert T. Short wrote:

> On 09/29/2013 10:03 AM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>> On 09/26/2013 01:54 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
>>> On 09/26/2013 02:51 PM, Michael D. Godfrey wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Now, what about the default graphics_toolkit? The GUI seems
>>>> fine with fltk. Should this be the default? I know that there are
>>>> arguments on both sides. In my case I now always use fltk.
>>> 
>>> I'm OK with making OpenGL+FLTK the default:
>>> 
>>> http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/55680de6a897
>>> 
>>> jwe
>> 
>> I'm not clear on what is gained by OpenGL+FLTK.  If it is a gnuplot license 
>> issue, the license is pretty open, it's just that it predates the modern 
>> open source licenses and is too much trouble to go back and get approval to 
>> modify.  At least, that is my understanding of it.  It's seems like hegemony 
>> for it to not be an approved license.
>> 
>> I've built Octave with OpenGL and FLTK.  Fedora 14 has FLTK 1.1.10 (there is 
>> a 1.3 or greater on the latest Fedora...I see there is a Gnome 2 branch 
>> called Mate' so I might upgrade sometime this winter).  It seems that FLTK 
>> is primarily another Widgets provider, similar to Qt. There is support, but 
>> it is limited.  Its widgets look different from the rest of the GUI.  For 
>> those who haven't tried Octave with gnuplot in the GUI setting, Octave tries 
>> as best as possible to use gnuplot's Qt terminal for which the look and feel 
>> is a great match.  At first blush, Octave/gnuplot with Qt looks nice, and is 
>> using one Widget provider.
>> 
>> FLTK doesn't appear to add the object-oriented plot elements, what so many 
>> desire; and something I highly discourage much preferring script based plot 
>> decoration and refinement because that is reproducible where manual moving 
>> plot elements is ephemeral. Neither does gnuplot, but there is a chance of 
>> getting such a thing with gnuplot's Qt terminal. (The first time I've ever 
>> felt such a thing had a greater than 0% chance.)  If object-oriented plot 
>> editing is a goal, it might be wise to make everything just one Widget 
>> system, and if I understand correctly, Qt is the choice at this point.
>> 
>> Dan
>> 
>> PS: In both FLTK and gnuplot graphics, "image" is currently crashing Octave 
>> on my system.
> 
> I am not really sure what Daniel said here, but I really hope the plan isn't 
> to make gnuplot go away.  For all the warts, gnuplot makes publication 
> quality plots and fltk plots are ugly.  I don't care what the defaults are 
> since I am perfectly comfortable making things work the way I want them to.
> 
> Bob

For me, the major drawback of OpenGL is the lack of consistency between 
displayed figures and output produced by print().  Lack of support for TeX when 
producing output via print() puts a real damper on publication graphics.

In any event, the gnuplot toolkit is here to stay.  The discussion is about 
changing the default toolkit to FLTK.

Ben