Any attempt to read an input file or pipe fails with the error message:

Failed to read file /home/brent/quickplot/plot.dat: lseek() failed

A workaround is the link the quickplot binary with the upstream
libsndfile-1.0.28
rather than the libsndfile-1.0.31 packaged with Debian 11

For instance, after installing libsndfile-1.0.28 in /usr/local/lib,
quickplot
will work if started with this shell script:

#!/bin/sh #force linkage with our local version of libsndfile
# (1.0.28 rather than Debian's 1.0.31)
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH exec /usr/bin/quickplot "$@"

I am using Debian 11 on x86 (tested both 32 or 64-bit) with various
Linux 5.x kernels.

Hi Brent,

1. First thank you for submitting this bug ticket.  I'm not sure if I have
write access to the debian bug system, but we'll see.

2.  I'm the sole downstream developer of quickplot.  quickplot as
distributed by Debian GNU/Linux was pretty cool stuff.  It currently has
some package dependencies that have broken it.  In particular, libsndfile
and GTK3.  And so, quickplot is in need of refactoring, maybe dropping the
libsndfile dependency and removing deprecated GTK3 API usage.  As it turns
out, I just happened to have released (alpha) a much larger software
package that kind-of needs a "quickplot" like tool to help my current
work.  So I need to fix quickplot for my own use.  I have not used it in a
while.

3. I looked at your bio.  We seem to have a little bit of overlap in
professional interests,  my CV is at http://107.191.96.171/cv.html , sorry
it's http without https yet.

4. My new alpha software package is at
https://github.com/lanceman2/quickstream  , you might find it interesting.

cheers
lance
"$@"

Hi Brent,

5.  I forgot to mention.  I'm using Debian 12 with GNOME and on that, both
libsndfile and GTK3 break quickplot; though "apt install quickplot" works,
but it installs a broken program.  I can't test your fix very easily on my
system.  I'd rather refactor quickplot than downgrade my OS. (ya, I know,
VMs, but I worry about slow displays and lots of unknowns ...; and VMs turn
me off in general) GTK3 uses a Wayland Display (on Debain 12 GNOME) and the
X11/wayland wrapper stuff seems to be broken.   You see, quickplot uses raw
libX11 code to get more speed than that is gotten from the cairo/x11
wrapper crap in GDK (GTK3), on older systems.   My refactoring will use
WaylandDisplay and not libX11, and that promises to be much faster than
libX11 ever was.   Wayland should be better and faster, but it has been a
long time coming; and has totally broken lots of my code.
GdkWaylandDisplay (GTK3 sub-library) is now giving me pain...   I feel that
the GTK3 and GTK4 developers are sadists.

Linus is talking about my pain in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc


Thanks again for your help.  Very helpful feedback.

cheers
lance

Hi Lance,

I'd been holding off installing Debian 12 because I routinely rely on
X11 for remote access.
Sorry to hear the the X11<->Wayland wrapper is not quite ready for prime
time.

Linus was, as usual, spot on in his lampooning the lack of binary
compatibility in Linux user space.
While it might be understandable that not all Fedora/Redhat binaries run
under Ubuntu/Debian, it's
inexcusable that old binaries will not run on the same distro's latest
release on the same arch.
This the main reason why Linux can't break into the mainstream desktop apps.

For Debian 11, fixing quickplot will likely involve simply comparing
libsndfile-1.0.28 with Debian's 1.0.31 to identify the "breaking change"
and modifying either quickplot or sndfile to fix the problem.

I'll send you a patch to quickplot in the coming weeks if I end up
changing it, leaving you to wrestle with the GTK3 issues unique to
Debian 12.

- brent

P.S.  Are you aware of any other graphing package that accepts ASCII
numeric input from a pipe?
(i.e. a viable alternative to quickplot?)


Lance Arsenault wrote:

Hi,

Am Sun, Jul 09, 2023 at 10:14:17PM -0700 schrieb Brent Roman:

I'd like to salvage quickplot to the Debian Science team.  Any patch
fixing the problem you reported would be great.  Since I have no
capacity to migrate the package to GTK3 it might be that we need
to drop that package anyway.  Hopefully the move to Github[1] might
attract some contributors to do the porting work.

Kind regards
    Andreas.


[1] https://github.com/lanceman2/quickplot

Please, proceed.

Thanks,