From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Tue Feb 17 14:15:18 1998
Subject: gnuplot for win32-octave
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Thomas Hoffmann <hoffmann at ehmgs2 dot et dot tu-dresden dot de>
Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 14:15:47 -0600

On 17-Feb-1998, Thomas Hoffmann <hoffmann at ehmgs2 dot et dot tu-dresden dot de> wrote:

| I am in the unfortunate situation that I have to show somebody
| Octave using Win95. 
| Because I most of the time work with HPUX and OS/2 I had to grab
| all the stuff necessary for using the Win95 version from archives.
| 
| Now I noticed that I need to load a 20MB developer package just 
| to be able to patch the impotent Gnuplot from Win95 ?!
|
| I ask you very humbly if anybody of you know a way to circumvent
| this, because I do not intend to do Win development otherwise the
| next time.

I'm not even sure if you can build the patched version of gnuplot
using the gnu-win32 tools (perhaps Mumit Khan can say for sure).
You might be able to build it with some other Windows-based C
compiler.

What is apparently not allowed by the gnuplot license is for someone
else to use patched gnuplot sources to build a binary for you, unless
the person doing the patching and distributing is a gnuplot developer
who has incorporated the patches into an official version (or at
least a semi-official beta version, I suppose).

It would be nice if the gnuplot people would choose slightly different
licensing terms that would allow distribution of modified versions in
both binary and complete source form.  Requiring that modifications be
distributed as patch files presents quite a problem.  This problem is
just another reason that I'm looking to switch to something else to
handle graphics in future Octave releases.

jwe