Guppi Update

[Jon Trowbridge <trow emccta com>]

Every other free software project has a weekly news thing now, so why
not Guppi? :-)

A week ago I promised a tarball release in a week.  My original plan
was to "get the bare minimum point-and-click plot creation
implemented", and then release it... but I've been doing a little more
than the minimum.

I do have pointy-clicky scatter plots working in a limited-but-nice
fashion (no zooming/navigation, no axes, no brushing, no layering of
multiple plots).  Except for the axes, all of that stuff is
implemented; it just needs to be debugged, tuned, and hooked into the
UI --- so I hope to be able to add plot functionality fairly quickly
for the second release.  You still can't quite create a plot with only
mouse-clicks: two or three cryptic guile commands are still necessary.
Adding a menu item to the same thing will take about 15 minutes,
so I consider this essentially done.

I've also set up plug-in system for plots, and the scatter plot is the
now a plug-in.  With plotting even more decoupled from the
application, it should be very easy to create new plot types.  It
should also be possible (once the proper "glue" plug-ins are written)
to implement new plot types in non-C languages that have
Gnome bindings.

Eventually I also want to add plug-in architectures for data type and
data importing.  In general, any objects which come in multiple
"flavor" of will end up in loadable modules.

Other work included:
* Simplifying the build.  Our configure.in file is now much cleaner.
* De-crufted some code related to data importing.  I still have one
  or two bugs to hunt down in the changes.

So the release is imminent.  I hope to have it ready sometime this
weekend or early next week, depending on if any really bad bugs pop
up.  My hard deadline is to release soon enough to get a blurb in
Havoc's next Gnome new summary.  

Let me urge you again: I'd really appreciate it if people would
check-out guppi3, built it on a non-lintel platform, and report the
results to me.

Also, I'd like to find volunteers who would be willing to make RPMs
and/or debian packages for guppi (for both this and future releases).

If anyone wants to help out with either test-builds or packaging,
please contant me at trow@gnu.org.

-JT

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