Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 405411
Plotting problems in octave
Last modified: 2008-02-13 00:12:56 EST
Description of problem: There seems to be serious problems with octave's plotting capabilities. Plots are made with gnuplot, so it's difficult to know which program is at fault, but it looks as though sometimes garbage is being sent to gnuplot. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): octave-2.9.15-2.fc8 gnuplot-4.2.0-7.fc8 How reproducible: The problems are quite easily triggered. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start octave and give the following set of commands 2. r = pi * rand(2000,1); 3. hist(r,50) Actual results: Only some of the histogram is plotted and you are likely to get errors beginning with something like: line 34336: warning: Skipping unreadable file "-��1�" and/or many lines such as gnuplot> e ^ line 398: invalid command gnuplot> 2.07050171829031 0 ^ line 398: invalid command gnuplot> 2.07050171829031 52 ^ line 398: invalid command Expected results: A histogram of the data using 60 bins should be plotted. Additional info:
Created attachment 273921 [details] Patch to gnuplot.spec to enable the wxt terminal
This is occuring because the wxt terminal is not currently enabled in the Fedora release of gnuplot. The feature has been in gnuplot since release 4.2.0, and recent versions of octave assume it is present if gnuplot is newer than that release. The wxt terminal can be enabled by simply requiring the build to depend on wxGTK, as in the patch to the gnuplot.spec file I attached. I have verified that after recompiling with this option, plotting works again in octave, so I'm reassigning this as a gnuplot bug.
OK, after further investigation, it turns out that the lack of wxt terminal was not at fault--rather I had some customizations on my computer that were causing similar errors. In fact, it appears that this is a bug in the 4.2.0 release of gnuplot, which I have verified is fixed in the 4.2.2 release currently available in the development branch. So, this bug can be closed by pushing the 4.2.2 release to Fedora 8, but I would still like to see the wxt terminal enabled.
Thanks for bug report and excellent and fast investigation, this problem is fixed in gnuplot-4.2.2-1.fc8.
gnuplot-4.2.2-1.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update gnuplot'
I've installed the new version of gnuplot from the updates-testing repository. The failure when plotting the histogram is gone, but plotting in general is still seriously messed up when histograms are involved, as the following set of commands will show. r = 2*pi * rand(2000,1); plot(r) plot(r.^2) hist(r,30) This may require an update of octave to 2.9.19 as well as the gnuplot update. I'll try and upgrade octave on my own this evening to see if it helps. I'll report back what I find.
gnuplot-4.2.2-1.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
Can you possibly push an update to F-7 too?
gnuplot-4.0.0-19.fc7 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 7
gnuplot-4.0.0-19.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update gnuplot'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F7/FEDORA-2008-1123
gnuplot-4.0.0-19.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.