Talk:Plotutils

Notability

@GDallimore: Inclusion into DEBIAN and the port to Windows is in my view more than enough prove of notability. --Swen (talk) 07:34, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Why would that make it WP:Notable? Where's a third party source to confirm that this is even the case. And I cannot possibly see how the fact that someone has ported it to Windows makes it notable. GDallimore (Talk) 07:45, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

To be included into Debian, requires notability (DEBIAN is not SourceForge. To be included into Debian requires more than just a .deb file.) Source of Plotutils is GNU. Debian is a third party source. The port to Windows is just an additional indirect evidence. --Swen (talk) 10:36, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

How does it require notability? It requires it to be useful, but that's about it. Debian has thousands of utilities and libraries for performing different useful tasks. Debian may be a third party from GNU, but Debian has published nothing which discusses plotutils in detail therefore there is no third party reliable source discussing the topic of this article. The idea that a Windows port conveys notability on a piece of software just sounds ridiculous to me. GDallimore (Talk) 11:04, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Make your suggestion for deletion and find out. --Swen (talk) 11:54, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Add: got two third party sources in Talk:List_of_GNU_packages#Notability with a comment on notability. --Swen (talk) 11:50, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Then add them here! GDallimore (Talk) 14:08, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

I added other ref links about academic use of plotutils. These are in bioinformatics, mathematics and physics. Does that support to say that plotutils is notable? Piccolist 07:34, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Well found, but I think these are just trivial mentions, which appears to be all that this software gets. I've nommed for deletion in the absence of any progress in demonstrating notability. GDallimore (Talk) 09:44, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

I think it's notable. Gronky (talk) 13:34, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Relationship to gnuplot

Anyone know the relation to gnuplot? The FAQ for the latter says "It used to be distributed by the FSF, however, due to licensing issues it is no longer."[1]

Since GNU has plotutils, why did they previously distribute gnuplot? During what time did they distribute gnuplot? Was plotutils written as a reaction to gnuplot adopting a non-free licence? How does Debian distribute gnuplot given it's seemingly non-free licence? Gronky (talk) 13:39, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

According to the plotutils manual, it's origin is the first version of the UNIX, so it's development should not be a reaction to gnuplot. Since plotutils has been a package which consists of plot-filters/converters and API, gnuplot might intend to realize powerful interactive program. Piccolist 03:27, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Plotutils no more officially maintained. But others do

I was searching for the maintainers of plotutils and nothing is happening since 2008. Even if plotutils is no more improved, it could be maintained. It doesn't compile anymore because of the evolution of the source code in other libraries.

I spent some time to find a bugzilla for this package but in vain. What can be found are other places where bugs are reported, like https://github.com/mxe/mxe/blob/master/src/plotutils-2.6-libpng-1.5.patch which solved my compilation problem.

Looking at GNU_Savannah is also useless. --Nbrouard (talk) 15:22, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Now it is really broken: I have upgraded my system to kernel 3.18 and although the patch described above allows it to compile, the library will crash at run time, as soon as I try pl_open. I have tried with libpng version 1.4 and 1.6 but nothing works!

I remember, one day in 2006, I wrote a small note on my web page, complaining that plotutils was not supported any more (2.4.1 at the time I think). Now this is the same song again. So sad.

70.31.239.146 (talk) 01:20, 6 September 2015 (UTC)