Bug#869135: Please don't adopt giza for libpgplot-perl

[Ole Streicher]

Hi Karl,

I am the Debian maintainer of giza, and I created this bug to move from
pgplot to giza. The giza lib is already used in dpuser/qfitsview,
wcslib, gyoto, and others. While it still does not implement all
functionality, the subset is good enough for many (probably most of the)
end user applications. My impression after speaking with the giza
developers was: If something does not work well (in an application),
they will fix it (and I already had this case when converting dpuser to
libgiza).

Giza has a few advantages over PGPLOT: First (and most important), it is
true Open Source software. This is a very high-rated point in Debian,
since our distribution is dedicated to free software. See our social
contact,

https://www.debian.org/social_contract

It basically means, that if there is free software available, we usually
prefer that over proprietary software. In the case of libpgplot5-perl,
only switching to giza allowed that package to become part of the Debian
distribution (Debian contrib, where it was before, is not a part of the
Debian distribution).

Another advantage is that giza is actively developed, while pgplot is
abandoned since 2001. That makes it very hard to fix bugs in pgplot, and
f.e. nobody will probably check for security relevant issues or fix them
(which is f.e. important if someone provides a web service based on
libpgplot5-perl).

Finally, giza has really a much more modern concept than pgplot, which
also makes it worth to be adopted.

To summarize, I would very much prefer to keep the package linked to
giza, and to fix the problems with giza when they appear in the wild.
But this is my personal opinion; the final decision is up to the package
maintainer (Gregor Herrmann, and the Debian Perl Group).

Best regards

Ole

On 25.07.2018 13:32, Karl Glazebrook wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I want to bring up an issue with the perl/PGPLOT package on
> Debian/Ubuntu. The relevant apt package is ‘libpgplot-perl’. (This came
> up when I was installing PDL on Ubuntu and getting an unexpected
> graphics library instead of pgplot.)
>  
> In short, in the latest version of Ubuntu (>=17)  the dependency on the
> pgplot5 package has been replaced with one on
> libcpgplot0. See https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=pgplot
>  
> libcpgplot0 replaces the true pgplot library with a supposedly API
> compatible library provided by the giza package
> (see http://giza.sourceforge.net/documentation/pgplot.shtml). I can
> imagine that it was thought that this was a good idea as it is newer, C
> based, etc.
>  
> While it is great to see this active development I do not think this has
> been handled in quite the best way. Giza is not a 100% pgplot API
> replacement, as yet. I am actually quite familiar with giza and have
> played with it. The giza library does NOT implement all pgplot functions
> and some of them work differently to the true pgplot library. (I know as
> I have tested this and have also corresponded with the developers who
> are also astronomers just down the road from at Monash Uni).This is
> clearly documented on the above web page and is an important issue for
> those of us who rely on pgplot for legacy code.
>  
> Also I do not think it should be done this way in principle. Obviously
> giza provides a drop in libpgplot replacement for those who wants to use
> it, so  how it should work is to make a ‘libpgplotgiza-perl’ instead to
> provide the option FOR THOSE WHO WISH TOO.
>  
> (I wish someone had asked me before making this change, after all I am
> the owner still of the CPAN perl/PGPLOT package whose functionality this
> is providing.)
>  
> I would like to get this revered. It is quite unclear to me who is
> making these decisions, I am not familiar with the Debian packaging
> universe. I was told by emailing here I could reopen this issue
> 
> thank you,
>  
> Karl Glazebrook
>