bless roger's gnuplot as official?

[bwv549]

I really like the original rgplot (aka 'gnuplot' gem). It is a great
gem. Unfortunately, its development has been abanded by its author
(or so it would seem).

Roger Pack put it up on github about a half year ago after consulting
with the mailing groups. (http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/191589) I
noticed he has a gem named rdp-gnuplot up on the repos. How about
making Roger's the official 'gnuplot' gem? In other words, have Roger
push his gem as 'gnuplot' instead of 'rdp-gnuplot'. Any objections to
this? This will allow Roger (and the community since Roger is open to
pull requests) the ability to make some improvements to the 'official'
gem.

Of course, this depends on if the original developer has 'claimed' the
gnuplot gem on gemcutter. If not I move that Roger 'claim' it. If
people want the original 'gnuplot' they can always get it by version
( gem install gnuplot -v 2.2 )

Browsing the code, I know some minor improvements have already been
made.

Here are a couple things that could be updated (assuming Roger hasn't
done these yet):

1. Get mouse interactions working using this workaround:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/293549

2. The ability to 'unset' settings.
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/307504

 

[Ryan Davis]

In other words, have Roger
push his gem as 'gnuplot' instead of 'rdp-gnuplot'. Any objections to
this? This will allow Roger (and the community since Roger is open to
pull requests) the ability to make some improvements to the 'official'
gem.

what does it matter if people contribute to the "official" one, or to =
roger's fork? If they're contributing, they're contributing.

 

[Aldric Giacomoni]

what does it matter if people contribute to the "official" one, or to
roger's fork? If they're contributing, they're contributing.

I agree. Same with rails' will-paginate, or rather,
mislav_will-paginate. People know that Mislav's is the official one, and
if you don't, Google tells you by bringing up Mislav's fork first.

 

[Joel VanderWerf]

1. Get mouse interactions working using this workaround:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/293549

The good news is that gnuplot version 4.3 solves this problem by letting
you bind to the close event. (Before 4.3, using xwindows, you either
have to use -persist, which doesn't support mouse, or you have to have a
another process polling for WM_STATE=withdrawn using xprop.)

Here[1] is a version of my gnuplot lib that has the appropriate
workarounds for each version of gnuplot up thru the 4.4 beta. (It also
uses the version to choose the terminal type.) It should be fairly easy
to at least get the 4.3 code out of that, even if you don't want to
bother with support for older versions. Briefly, the code is this:

On xwindows, fork a gnuplot and send it these commands:

set mouse
bind allwindows Close 'exit gnuplot'
# your plotting commands here

then the parent just does:

Process.wait

This gnuplot lib is not really a competitor to either of the two gems.
It doesn't try to wrap up the plot configuration commands in any kind of
object oriented interface. (I prefer to use the string interface rather
than objects, because it is so familiar and compact.)

[1] http://path.berkeley.edu/~vjoel/vis/plot.tgz