Re: Choosing graphics backend for documentation

[Michael Godfrey]

I can see that it would be useful if you could build the doc. I assume this is on a Mac.
Since I know little about the state of graphics capability on the Mac I am not sure
what the best choice may be. If it is true that OpenGL does not work on the Mac,
and therefore Octave implementations on the Mac lack the GUI as well as non-gnuplot
graphics, I would say that this failure should take priority.

Is there any prospect of getting the needed graphics functionality to work on
the Mac? Other applications which require graphics similar to Octave have
successful ports to the Mac, including through 10.10.5.

One of my early patches for the Manual processing had gnuplot as an option,
and it worked well enough (i.e. it completed normally and the plots were viewable).
However, much improvement is needed in the plotting section of the Manual
and this will be done using OpenGL since that is what users will be using.
Any gnuplot dependency should, of course, be a compile option which is normally
turned off so that builds do not normally depend on the presence of gnuplot.
Since Rik put in quite a lot of work to remove this dependency, it would not seem
appropriate to undo this work.

Michael

On 08/17/2015 02:28 PM, Ben Abbott wrote:

No, that’s not it. What is desired (at least for me) is that the documentation can be built in the absence of osmesa, and/or working OpenGL toolkits.