On Fri, Sep 02, 2016 at 11:57:08 -0500, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
My thinking is "yes" and "no". Yes on the bigger items, such as things that
might cause a v4.0 series gnuplot to fail to interpret properly and
therefore not create a plot. No on fairly special cases that might be
outside the ordinary type of plot.
By disallowing older versions of gnuplot, that's ruling out users who are
looking to put in some simple data and create a simple plot (say a line
plot), e.g., the non-power-user class. Say, for example students creating a
lab report.
That is a reasonable position to take, but the logic must be put into
the scripts to support that. It is broken as it is right now and not
ready for release IMHO.
There is already a set of checks and functions in place for whether
gnuplot supports certain features. That needs to be updated to work with
the current baseline. There are many places now where Octave sends a
command to gnuplot, and gnuplot responds with an arcane (to the Octave
user) error message about unsupported syntax or options.