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• File r34.1/plot/README.x11 — part of check-in [f2fda60abd] at 2011-09-02 18:13:33 on branch master — Some historical releases purely for archival purposes

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Notes on the new X11 features are attached. 

Ed
----------------------------------
Ed Kubaitis (ejk@ux2.cso.uiuc.edu)
Computing & Communications Services Office - University of Illinois, Urbana

===============================================================================
Gnuplot_x11 for 3.2
-------------------

New features
------------
   o CRIPPLED_SELECT build option for SVR3 platforms with incomplete
     or faulty implementations of BSD select().

   o Xlib only

     X11 support no longer requires Athena or Motif libraries and
     include files. This makes life easier for people on platforms
     with Open Look only. It also simplifies X11 tailoring on all
     platforms. Oh yes, and the gnuplot_x11 executable is smaller
     (~43K instead of ~500K on RS/6000.)

     makefile.unx has been edited to remove references to Athena &
     Motif. Also, with the exception of the HP definition (where it
     appeared to be intentionally specific to R4) all references to 
     X11R4 have also been removed since this version should work without 
     changes on R3, R4, or R5.

   o Grayscale handling

     * grayscale displays get monochrome rendering by default

     * '-gray' option & resource forces grayscale rendering on grayscale
       or color displays.

     * '-mono' option forces monochrome rendering on color displays.

     * special grayscale resources (separate from color)

   o Miscellaneous

     * By default, the window is no longer momentarily cleared when
       a new plot is displayed. The new plot "silently" replaces the
       previous one.  I found this useful when running some of the demos, 
       such as contours.demo, where a plot "adds" a feature to
       the one before (gnuplot "movies" anyone?;-).

       However, a "-clear" command line-option and "gnuplot*clear: on"
       restores the momentary clear that was there previously.

     * Added ptx_x11 and convex_x11 machine options to makefile.unx.

     * There is an X11FLAGS option (-DOLD_SELECT) for old 4.2 BSD systems
       (such as SunOS 3.5) which don't have the FD_XXX macros that
       go with select().


A few words about CRIPPLED_SELECT
---------------------------------
I closely reviewed four different ways people had devised for dealing with 
the "select error" problem encountered on some SVR3 platforms. I had one 
such platform (Sequent Dynix/PTX) available for testing. Unfortunately 3 of 
the four ways that had been submitted did not work for PTX (which has 
problems with non-blocking I/O and Unix domain sockets as well as select). 
The fourth way worked there but it used SV STREAMS and I had no way to 
verify that it would also work on all the other platforms that encountered 
the problem.

What was done instead was to use a temporary file instead of a pipe for
gnuplot->gnuplot_x11 communication when CRIPPLED_SELECT is used. This is 
like a sledgehammer - crude but (hopefully) robust. It should work on any 
platform with open(), read(), write(), close(), unlink(), getpid(), and 
getppid().

Response time is not bad with CRIPPLED_SELECT. Timings on an RS/6000 
for all.demo (hitting RETURN as soon as a plot appears) indicate that 
CRIPPLED_SELECT only adds an average of .5 seconds to response time, 
about what one would expect given the 1 second timer used. And curiously, 
CRIPPLED_SELECT used 30% less CPU than the default mode.

Testing
-------
The new gnuplot_x11 was tested here on the following platforms:

   o IBM RS/6000 AIX 3.1.6 (IBM X11R3)
   o IBM RS/6000 AIX 3.1.6 (MIT X11R4)
   o Apollo 400s DomainOS 10.3 (Apollo X11R3)
   o Sun SPARC SunOS 4.1.1-GFX-Rev2 (X11R?)
   o Vax BSD 4.3 Reno (X11R5)
   o Vax Ultrix-32 V3.0 Rev 64 (MIT X11R4)
   o Sun 3/50 SunOS 3.5 (MIT X11R4)
   o Sun 3/60 SunOS 4.1 (MIT X11R4)
   o NeXT (X11 R?)
   o Convex C2 9.0 OS (MIT X11R5)
   o Sequent Dynix 3.1 (MIT X11R5)
   o Sequent Dynix/PTX (MIT X11R5)
   o Cray 2 - Unicos 5+?
   o Cray Y-MP - Unicos 5+?

And with the following servers:

   o NCD 19 monochrome (NCD X11R3)
   o Visual X-15 monochrome (Visual X11R4)
   o Sun 3/50 monochrome (MIT X11R4)
   o IBM XStation 120 grayscale (IBM X11R4)
   o Visual Turbo X-19 grayscale (Visual X11R4)
   o IBM XStation 120 color (IBM X11R4)
   o Sun 3/60 color (MIT X11R4)
   o IBM XStation 130 1.3 (IBM X11R4)