severity 453128 important retitle 453128 octave-plplot: usage documentation out of date; hard to setup thanks
On Thursday 29 November 2007 09:18:16 Andrew Ross wrote:
> Can you confirm exactly what you are doing? The octave instructions
> are from upstream and not Debian specific. They are also out of date (as
> it says at the top of the file). Under Debian the basic commands are in
> the path. You don't need to add anything to .octaverc.
The error message I showed was exactly what I got when I followed the
directions as well as I could.
My .octaverc was:
addpath("/usr/share/plplot_octave/")
I want plplot to be the default, so I followed those directions. I used
addpath instead of the LOADPATH that the documentation says to use (mostly
talking about INSTALL.octave.gz and USAGE.octave.gz).
The documentation makes it very clear that the usual and standard way to use
plplot is to set it up in your .octaverc to be the default. It only
mentions toggle_plplot_use as an alternate way to do it if you wanted to
also be able to keep using gnuplot (which I don't).
> All you need to do is start octave, type toggle_plplot_use to switch
> from gnuplot plotting (default) to octave plotting, then type the plot
> commands. You need to make sure you install the required drivers. For
> interactive display this is likely to be plplot9-driver-xwin.
Okay, I removed my ~/.octaverc and tried it this way, and it seemed to work,
so this isn't a grave bug--I've adjusted accordingly. However, it's still
very difficult to get it working without better documentation.
The way you suggested works, but doesn't make plplot the default, which is
the desired effect. (Calling "toggle_plplot_use" in .octaverc does appears
to do it, though).
From USAGE.octave.gz, it says:
"""
You must add the plplot_octave script installation directory to Octave
LOADPATH *before* the standard Octave LOADPATH. The best way to do this
is to create a .octaverc file in your home directory. By default
LOADPATH ="<install-directory>/share/plplot_octave//:"
If you also want to use Octave's standard plotting package, gnuplot, you
must set LOADPATH as:
LOADPATH ="<install-directory>/share/plplot_octave//:\
<install-directory>/share/octave//:"
and use the command "toggle_plplot_use" to switch between the two plot
packages.
"""
The key is that I want plplot to be the default--which was easy with
octave2.1--I don't want to call toggle_plplot_use in my programs. The
current documentation makes it sound like this is easy to do, but I still
can't make it work with octave2.9 unless I use the toggle_plplot_use method
you just suggested. It does work if I put toggle_plplot_use in
my .octaverc. That's okay with me, it just doesn't match how it's
documented.
> I agree the documentation is out of date and I will correct it upstream.
> toggle_plplot_use does not use LOADPATH on octave2.9 it uses addpath
> instead.
I adjusted the severity and retitled the bug, since this is mainly a
documentation issue.
Anyway, thanks for the help; I'm glad to have this working for myself. But
it would be nice if it clearly documented how to get it to work by default,
otherwise it's a regression from use with octave2.1, and it may be hard for
other users in the future unless it's updated.
Thanks! =)
--
Wesley J. Landaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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