Re: Choosing graphics backend for documentation

[Ben Abbott]

> On Aug 17, 2015, at 12:43 PM, Mike Miller <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 11:07:39 -0500, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>> As far as the manual goes, "working" is the key word.
> 
> I agree. I think there's a lot going on in this thread which makes the
> various issues confusing.
> 
>> With the recent
>> development version I get errors, and the make process keeps attempting to
>> build the manual.  The solution for me is to just configure off the
>> documentation and not worry about it.
> 
> Does configure --disable-docs do the right thing for you?
> 
>> Could the manual build be configured
>> off by default?  Then have
>> 
>> make manualwithqttoolkit
>> make manualwithgnuplottoolkit
>> make manual (default whatever)
> 
> I think this is unnecessarily confusing. The intent is to be able to
> build the docs with make automatically and have the built manual
> distributed with the source. This lets others build from source and
> not have to worry about disabling or bypassing the make rules because
> the files are already there. Building the manual is a maintainer task,
> not an ordinary user task.
> 
> I agree with Michael that it's important that the official manual be
> built with (one of) the OpenGL toolkit(s) so the images that are
> distributed with the official source release and posted on the website
> are always consistent with what most users will work with by default.
> 
> As to "working":
> 
> * Does --disable-docs still work to avoid building the manual? If not,
> that's a bug.
> 
> * Does building from the source tarball (*not* from hg) error
> somewhere if the user doesn't have OpenGL or OSMesa? If not, that's a
> bug.
> 
> * If users don't have the capabilities to build the manual, it should
> be disabled automatically. This used to be as simple as "if you don't
> have texinfo or gnuplot, disable docs". This will need some work one
> way or another.
> 
> So the big question:
> 
> * Do we want to allow users who do not have OpenGL or OSMesa to build
> the manual images using Gnuplot as a fallback? Do we want to require
> some manual option be given to make sure that this doesn't happen
> somehow accidentally when an official release is being built? Or do we
> want to require working OpenGL and OSMesa to build the manual at all
> from now on? Or can we resort to building the images on-screen for
> users without OSMesa?

In order of preference?

(1) qt+OpenGL with osmesa
(2) fltk+OpenGL with osmesa
(3) qt+OpenGL without osmesa
(4) fltk+OpenGL without osmesa
(5) gnuplot

I’d like as many people as possible to build the docs to maximize the 
population of potential bug fixers / contributors.

> Ben, does patching the scripts to *not* set the plots invisible work
> for you? I'm still not clear whether the OSX problem is just OSMesa or
> if it's any use of GL2PS.

I’m able to use both the qt and fltk toolkits from the cli or gui (although 
after using fltk to produce a plot, octave crashes on exit, qt does not). GL2PS 
works fine for all versions of Mac OS (as far as I know).

Mac OS has been a pain for a few years now. However, Mac OS 10.10 is a big 
improvement. The gui is now fully functional (i.e the qt toolkit works).

Ben