Re: [comparing plotting packages] Re: Developing
On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Peter S Galbraith wrote:
> >
> > I'm not sure if it is packaged yet but in my opinion somebody should
> > spend the time to evaluate these programs and perhaps enhance the "best"
> > of it. The lack of a good plotting program is the cruxial point why
> > many of my collegues at the physics department not switch to Linux.
>
This is exactly the goal of the Guppi project,
http://www.gnome.org/guppi/
We have >70K lines of code with "wc -l", >25K with "grep ';' | wc -l" -
a very good start on the software. It's still developers-only; don't try
to do work with it just yet.
One goal of the project is to create an extensible, modular backend
library that can be used by a command line program, a "plotting shell"
(like R or GnuPlot), and multiple GUIs, including an XGobi-like data
visualization application and a more printed-output-oriented GUI similar
to Grace or Excel.
Guppi will also be used by the Gnumeric spreadsheet and Genius scientific
calculator as a runtime-loaded plot component. This is how the Excel
charts work. Gnumeric has tons of scientific functions and is a nice
science tool in its own right.
Guppi is intended to be a modern, extensible, powerful application, not a
weekend hack. It would be possible to write Yet Another Plot Program or
Yet Another Plot Widget in a much shorter timeframe; but we are going slow
and doing it right, so in the future people can always extend Guppi or
slap a new interface on it instead of writing a new application. There
will be room for everyone's favorite interface, and new interface writers
won't have to figure out how to do axis layout, pick round numbers, draw
plot markers, or other tedium.
I would very much like to see people working on new non-Gnome frontends
and helping me with the core. Possible frontends include a command line
tool, scripting-shell tool (which gives the GUI more scripting for free,
though the GUI already has some Guile scripting), KDE GUI, or Windows GUI.
I wouldn't mind it if someone "adopted" the Gnumeric component as well.
It would also be cool to see a Debian package, though I would expect it to
be pretty hard to package (Gnome dependencies, plus it ships with its own
shared libraries...).
Anyway, just a little self-promotion, and if anyone's interested check out
the website, check out the code, and subscribe to the Guppi mailing list.
Thanks,
Havoc
Reply to: