From bug-request at octave dot org Tue Jan  3 15:37:14 2006
Subject: Re: gnuplot gset
From: Quentin Spencer <qspencer at ieee dot org>
To: Kevin Judd <kevin at maths dot uwa dot edu dot au>
CC: bug at octave dot org
Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2006 08:48:41 -0600

Kevin Judd wrote:

>
> This not a bug its just misguided. I have used octave instead of 
> matlab since 1999, but beginning 2004 I've been doing other things. 
> Now I am back to science and using octave and find my scripts and 
> functions are producing a lot of silly warnings. The worst of which is 
> the following.
>
> warning: gset is deprecated and will be removed from a future
> warning: version of Octave.
> warning: You should use the higher-level plot functions
> warning: ("plot", "mesh", "semilogx", etc.) instead
> warning: of the low-level plotting commands.
> warning: If you absolutely must use this function, use the
> warning: internal version __gnuplot_set__ instead.
>
> This is idiotic. Did the person that did this actually use 
> octave/gnuplot? I mean to do serious science requiring publication of 
> figures in journals and books?
>
> gnuplot is a powerfully plotting package and gset is the only way into 
> a lot of that power, like positioning legends, controlling tick marks, 
> grids, fonts, etc, etc. (Unless octave now has some other undocumented 
> "high-level" way of doing this.)
>
> Change the name of gset if you must (although I cannot imagine why) 
> but not to some stupid mangled name that suggests you'd rather people 
> didn't use octave for serious science.
>
> Kevin


This has been discussed several times on the mailing lists before--see 
the archives for all of the reasons why. The short answer is that there 
is an implementation of Matlab-style handle graphics in progress which 
requires that the gnuplot interface be extracted and modularized from 
the core of octave, and the __gnuplot_set__ change is part of that 
transition. Yes, there are a lot of things that can't currently be done 
without gset, but that situation will be changing. Unfortunately, I'm 
not involved, so I can't comment on the current progress of handle 
graphics. You are always welcome to join the effort to improve Octave, 
of course. I think the early name change of gset was not aimed at "power 
users" such as yourself as much as beginners who were frequently asking 
questions on the mailing lists about gset commands that already had 
equivalent high-level Matlab-compatible commands.

-Quentin




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