[guppi-list] new guppi-based app

[Daniel Kottow <"dk17"@inf.tu-dresden.de>]

hello,

i have been maturing on the gtk/gnome/guppi code and decided to redo a
piece of software i made some months ago (cluster-senses). the result is
a generic histogramming and scatterplot tool which lets you share a
common subset selection over all plot windows. check it out at
http://www.inf.tu-dresden.de/~dk17/brush-bar
(i hope you dont feel this too close to guppis intentions. anyway, if
guppi once has the features i dont mind stopping the project ;-)

BTW, i want to congratulate you on the work you are doing. i enjoy
programming and even more using guppi. still, let me comment on some
issues i found on my way.

1) the barchart plug-in doesnt allow control over the font size of the
categorical axis. it seems like this axis uses lone_label to draw itself
and there is no public access to it through the axis plug-in.
2) a multi-column barchart is being pretty inefficient when redrawing. i
have used a 20 rows by 8 columns (stacked) chart and it scales much
worse than e.g. the scatter plot. 
3) maybe python linking was forgotten in the libGuppiConf.sh ?
4) IMHO it would be very useful to have the headers for the plug-ins
installed for developing. 
(some brute force approaches during my last programming effort made me
say the same...) 
but this time i have derived a plug-in from barchart and although this
seems very attractive, i had to supply the headers of the base class
(guppi-barchart) myself.
5) i have been using many plot widgets in a gtktable layout. this worked
really nice. but i wanted to be able to control the tools of all plots
simultaneously and couldnt figure out an easy way to do it. maybe you
can give me some hints? i believe this could be a useful option, to
group plots and make them response collectively to a tool action, e.g.
zoom.
now i am coding this directly into the guppi-csbarchart-tool source,
which does not seem ok to me.
6) (i know you know this already) if you add a new plug-in to guppi it
must be installed into your guppi installation. how about a command line
option when invoking guppi where you can tell him about additional plug
in directories?
7) (obsolete) in the last snapshot every plot gets the basic tools onto
its toolbar. it seems like the cvs version 0.35.1 already doesnt, so how
about a small snapshot upgrade?

greetings from the old east,
daniel.