Latest Guppi developments

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

Hello,

I'm not sure if anyone is on this list, but it seems too quiet so I
thought I'd give a progress report.

The short version: the next version of Guppi should appear soon, like this
week I hope. It's been several weeks since the last release which is far
too long. The next version will have a huge code diff from the first one,
but almost exactly the same visible functionality.

I just finished rearranging Guppi in a major way. Both plot types and data
import methods are now modules dynamically loaded with gmodule. Most of
the rest of the application has moved into a shared library, libguppi. 
Besides the nice modularity, the main reason for this is that we want to
export plotting functionality via CORBA, and don't want to launch Guppi in
order to do so. So there will be small CORBA server applications sharing a
lot of Guppi's code. I've written up some IDL and have the ball rolling on
this, though it doesn't work yet. Also, we would like a batch mode
command line version; this should be fairly easy the way I'm setting
things up.

Gtk--Draw's Gdk-ish components are now in Gtk--; there is a new Gtk--Plot
library containing the plot components.

I've written a new PlotLayout widget which automatically lays out plots
and their axes; it is far superior to the way Guppi did layout in 0.0.1
and is in the Gtk--Plot library. However it's still a little bad because
it has separate widgets for each axis and plot; I want to change this so
that it just has Gdk_Draw objects for each, and a single DrawingBuffer. 
That may not happen before the next release.

Major TODO items include an XML file format we can use to load and save
Guppi's state; and writing modules for different kinds of plot. 

Havoc