gnuplot: question about wxWidgets(-devel)& Universal variants

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 15:24, Jonathan Stickel wrote:
>
> wxWidgets and 64-bit has been a real PITA for some time now. The
> development series 2.9 has promise, but there are some problems.

I would have asked "what kind of problems", but I don't want to open a
can of worms ;)

At least it works for me for using a Gnuplot terminal. The old version
(2.8) also works of course, but only for 32-bit applications and it
lacks two nice features which is a bit painful.

> If you
> really need wxWidgets, I suggest using the X11/gtk backend.  See this old
> ticket for a full explanation:

I have no idea how to use X11/gtk backend, and since wxWidgets-devel
also work (with Cocoa interface), I see no reason for including yet
another alien into the game. But if that would simplify macports
packaging and if somebody can show me how to do it, I have nothing
against a working solution. I don't particularly like X11 thouh and
there is already an X11 terminal available (with slightly less
features), but if that's what it takes ...

> http://trac.macports.org/ticket/24350

I'm not sure that I understand all of what is written here.

> The variant for the 64-bit capable X11/gtk backend is available in the
> wxwidgets-python port.  This could be translated to the regular wxwidgets
> port if someone is interested.  I have stopped using wxwidgets due to these
> problems and am now using qt4.

I would never develop a wxWidgets application myself, and even the
author of wxWidgets code for gnuplot says that he is no longer
interested in further maintainance (and that he would have written Qt
code back then if he knew what he knows now). But since the code is
there and application works now, it would be nice to support it as
long as supporting is not too painful. The Portfile that I wrote
(https://trac.macports.org/ticket/33596) seems to work, its only
drawback is dependency on wxWidgets-devel and I'm not sure how that
works on older macs.

Gnuplot now also supports Qt terminal (which is not really polished
out yet, at least not for the mac; printing semi-crashes,
configuration is suboptimal and doesn't work out of the box), so Qt
terminal is definitely an alternative. It would help if some
knowledgable developer would fix a few mac-specific problems in
gnuplot source code though (I can describe problems, but don't know
how to solve them properly).

I wouldn't have used MacPorts' gnuplot at all, but I don't know any
other way if I want to use Octave. And AquaTerm is causing me serious
problems (= it doesn't work at all), so I need at least one working
terminal that's different from AquaTerm and both Qt and wxWidgets are
good candidates that finally happen to work on mac in gnuplot 4.6.

Mojca