XGraph seems to be badly broken :-(

[Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia <guille@iies.es>]

Hi all,

(At least in my Linux RedHat 6.0...)

...XGraph seems to be badly broken. Even after applying all the
three patches available in the ns-2 download page, it has a number
of serious problems and bugs. One of the most obvious (but not the
only one): just by moving the XGraph window, the program core dumps (!).
Exactly the same thing happens if you popup the 'About' box and then
click 'dismiss'. I went to the source page to see if they had a more
recent version, and not only they didn't, but also I saw that
development of XGraph has been discontinued and abandoned. Of
course, the binaries available there didn't work either.

Even without these serious bugs, xgraph seems to be very limited,
and I cannot see any advantages over other similar tools. Given
the huge number of open source, free plotting utilities available
in the net, why does ns-2 "support" / "recommend" this one?


Just for the record, I am now using Grace (derived from Ace)
which looks really nice and has a full-featured GUI as well
as advanced batch-processing capabilities. It can do almost
anything with your data and it is also very easy to use.

Another package (plplot) is a nice plotting library, (rather
than standalone utility), with C, C++, Fortran, Python and
*Tcl* bindings, which means that plotting capabilities could
be easily integrated into ns simulation scripts without much
hassle. plplot has a number of output drivers, of course
including a postscript one.

I really think that xgraph should be replaced with a better
plotting tool in the ns 'standard' distribution.


Regards,
G.
-- 
Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia
<guille@iies.es>