Re: XGraph seems to be badly broken :-(

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

John,

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

Well, if it works, even if it is not an outstanding tool, it will
surely be better than now. Anyway I would like to note that moving
to another plotting tool is not neccessarily a difficult step (see
below)

>
>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

The xgraph file format is simple, and most plotting tools will
understand it 'as is'. Even then, I did post an awk script for
converting xgraph output to grace to this list a few days ago;
this makes the process even easier.

>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.

Of course.

Grace can be found at:

http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/

And plplot:

http://emma.la.asu.edu/plplot/

However, I'd like to mention that plplot doesn't have 'raw' Tcl
bindings, as I thought, but incrTcl bindings. incrTcl is just
another OO extension for Tcl, just like OTcl. But this shouldn't
be a problem, because plplot also has C++ bindings and simple
wrappers could be written to access it from OTcl. Actually, I
think this would be really nice, because it would allow ns users
to plot graphs from within their simulation scripts.

One last idea. If the only reason for keeping xgraph is the
format of its input files, and given the fact that it is a
fairly minimal and limited tool, why not writing a plotting
tool explicitly aimed at ns, keeping the input file format?
This tool would then be a direct drop-in replacement so
that users would not need to do anything beyond just
replacing xgraph with nsgraph (or whatever it is called)
I guess most ps printing code in xgraph could be reused, and
the only work would be writing new (screen) drawing code,
which could possibly be done nicely through Tk. Also, this
would allow easier ns/nam integration.

>(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. :-)

I had a look at xgraph but it was a bit discouraging :-( When I
found other solutions I just forgot about it.

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