On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, Tony Richardson wrote: > I often use octave and do no plotting at all. Octave starts and runs > fine if gnuplot isn't installed. (It complains about not being able > to find gnuplot when the plot command is used.) Should there really > be a dependency if only a subset of features requires a package? > > I'd prefer to see gnuplot removed from the octave dependency list. > Of course then you'd have to deal with all the posts saying that > the plot command in octave is broken. So I don't know what the best > approach would be. How do others feel?
Actually, a viable solution for this was already proposed by John W Eaton in <http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-12/msg00283.html>. Since octave adds other directories to the path before it runs, it's possible to create a gnuplot wrapper that uses the real gnuplot if present and exits with a reasonable error message otherwise. Just to clarify, the reason I thought it was a hack was that it was an *octave-forge* script dealing with a *gnuplot* bug. I don't think the mechanism itself is in any way hacky. Igor -- http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/ |\ _,,,---,,_ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ZZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ [EMAIL PROTECTED] |,4- ) )-,_. ,\ ( `'-' Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D. '---''(_/--' `-'\_) fL a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-. Meow! If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. /DA -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
