[Pkg-electronics-devel] Bug#1108620: ngspice: Prospective upgrade of blt to 3.0 affects ngspice

[Sergei Golovan]

Hi, Holger, Carsten,

I'm sorry, when I prepared the patch, I minimized my own effort and didn't
bother to maintain compatibility with BLT 2. The problem with BLT 3 is that it
isn't released yet and I don't know when it'll be released. So,
currently keeping
ngspice compatible with BLT 2 is a must.

Also, my patch to ngspice relies on a bugfix to
https://sourceforge.net/p/blt/patches/46/
so it might be useless upstream before the patch there goes to the repository.

Anyway, I'm attaching a more complete version of the patch which doesn't break
compatibility with BLT 2. It might need a better way of finding blt.h
in the configure
script though.

On Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 10:11 PM Holger Vogt <holger.vogt at uni-due.de> wrote:
>
> Carsten,
>
> the next ngspice release (45) is planned for end of July.
>
> Up to now I did not consider any changes to the tclspice port.
>
> I will have a look at the BLT 3 sources.
>
> What about putting these changes into ngspice-46 (end of 2025)?
>
> Best regards
>
> Holger
>
>
> Am 01.07.2025 um 18:49 schrieb Carsten Schoenert:
> > Hello Sergei,
> >
> > I haven't heard from upstream about a new planned version for NGspice
> > yet but let's forward your news to Holger Vogt from the NGspice team.
> > You changes will also affect Ubuntu at one day.
> >
> > Am 01.07.25 um 18:22 schrieb Sergei Golovan:
> >
> >> I'm planning to upgrade blt to 3.0 shortly after the release of trixie,
> >> and this upgrade will affect ngspice. Specifically, the configure script
> >> will not be able to find new libBlt30.so (now it searches for
> >> libBLT.so), also blt.h will move to /usr/include/blt, and new blt
> >> will require to be initiated by calling Blt_TclInit(). The attached
> >> patch fixes these problems, and also modifies two scripts under
> >> examples/tclspice/:
> >>   1) namespace import blt::* won't work without -force now,
> >>   2) vector create will return error if the vector already exists
> >>   3) blt graphs will not have 'grid' subcommand anymore, grid
> >>      configuration will move to the 'axis' subcommand.
> >>
> >> You can do additional testing by using the blt packages from
> >> experimental.
> >
> > @Holger
> > The patch Sergei is talking about can be found in the Debian BTS
> >
> > https://bugs.debian.org/1108620
> >
> > In detail in this URL
> >
> > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?
> > att=1;bug=1108620;filename=blt3.patch;msg=5
> >
> > Maybe you already prepared in this direction in the upstream work of
> > ngspice?
> >
>


-- 
Sergei Golovan
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