Re: documentation images created with gnuplot

[Dmitri A. Sergatskov]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 12:25 PM, Rik <address@hidden> wrote:

On 09/23/2016 09:00 AM, octave-maintainers-request@gnu.org wrote:

Subject:

Re: Octave 4.2.0 release candidate 2 available for ftp

From:

"Dmitri A. Sergatskov" <address@hidden>

Date:

09/22/2016 06:46 PM

To:

"John W. Eaton" <address@hidden>

CC:

Octave Maintainers <address@hidden>

List-Post:

<mailto:octave-maintainers@gnu.org>

Precedence:

list

MIME-Version:

1.0

References:

<7c683e57-bb68-ce4b-0ba4-address@hidden>

In-Reply-To:

<7c683e57-bb68-ce4b-0ba4-address@hidden>

Message-ID:

<CAO+XyQKuubfFVFSmaSg0DOqxdSqYqY5kKaddress@hiddencom>

Content-Type:

multipart/alternative; boundary=001a1142a5f007657d053d22f111

Message:

2

On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 11:26 AM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:

The second release candidate for Octave 4.2.0 is available from

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/octave

There may be some problems that need to be fixed so this version may not become the 4.2.0 release without some changes but I hope to not have more than one or two more release candidates before the 4.2.0 release is final.

​I noticed that documentation images (well at least pdfs) are produced by gnuplot:

​(cd octave-4.2.0-rc2/doc/interpreter/

for file in *.pdf ; do pdfinfo $file ; done

​
Title:          /tmp/oct-Q078Z9.eps
Subject:        gnuplot plot
Creator:        gnuplot 5.0 patchlevel 3
Producer:       GPL Ghostscript 9.19
CreationDate:   Tue Sep 20 10:25:25 2016
ModDate:        Tue Sep 20 10:25:26 2016

...etc...

)
​

Was it intentional?

I doubt it was intentional.  The plots should be created with qt these days.  If you check one of the m-files in doc/interpreter that creates the images you will find the set_graphics_toolkit function which is quoted below.

## This function no longer sets the graphics toolkit; That is now done
## automatically by C++ code which will ordinarily choose 'qt', but might
## choose gnuplot on older systems.  Only a complete lack of plotting is a
## problem.
function set_graphics_toolkit ()
  if (isempty (available_graphics_toolkits ()))
    error ("no graphics toolkit available for plotting");
  elseif (! strcmp ("gnuplot", graphics_toolkit ()) ...
          && ! __have_feature__ ("OSMESA"))
    if (! any (strcmp ("gnuplot", available_graphics_toolkits ())))
      error ("no graphics toolkit available for offscreen plotting");
    else
      graphics_toolkit ("gnuplot");
    endif
  endif
endfunction

Generally, 'qt' will be selected.  However, if the build that created the tarball was done on some remote server that didn't have OSMESA then the toolkit would be switched to gnuplot.

--Rik

​My buildbot computer does have OSMesa, yet buildbot builds still use gnuplot.

It looks like we need to run 'make doc' through xvfb-run like we do with 'make check​'.

Dmitri.
--