[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: XGraph seems to be badly broken :-(



>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
><[email protected]>
>

We plan to be releasing xgraph ourselves with some of these bugs fixed
as a partial solution to some of the problems you mention.
I agree that xgraph is minimal; we don't plan on enhancing it other
than just fixing bugs.

There are a lot of reasons we can't just drop xgraph (some of the test
suites have saved xgraph output, we have xgraph conversion scripts,
and a lot of people know xgraph, good or bad).  Although momentum
means an all-out change is unlikely, I'd be happy to add some pointers
to other graphing tools to the web pages, and to take conversion
scripts compatible with ~ns-2/bin/raw2xg, if contributed.

Please URLs for grace/ace and/or plplot to the list to get things
started.

(About the specific xgraph bugs you mention, the "about box" bug seems
to be Linux specific.  We have some portability patches for xgraph,
including autoconf support, and we of course welcome patches to fix
other bugs. :-)

   -John Heidemann