#1108620 ngspice: Prospective upgrade of blt to 3.0 affects ngspice

Package:
ngspice
Source:
ngspice
Description:
Spice circuit simulator
Submitter:
Sergei Golovan
Date:
2025-07-03 16:01:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#1108620#5
Date:
2025-07-01 16:22:07 UTC
From:
To:
Package: ngspice
Version: 44.2+ds-1+exp1
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

Dear Maintainer,

I'm planning to upgrade blt to 3.0 shortly after the release of trixie,
and this upgrade will affect ngspice. Specifically, the configure script
will not be able to find new libBlt30.so (now it searches for
libBLT.so), also blt.h will move to /usr/include/blt, and new blt
will require to be initiated by calling Blt_TclInit(). The attached
patch fixes these problems, and also modifies two scripts under
examples/tclspice/:
 1) namespace import blt::* won't work without -force now,
 2) vector create will return error if the vector already exists
 3) blt graphs will not have 'grid' subcommand anymore, grid
    configuration will move to the 'axis' subcommand.

You can do additional testing by using the blt packages from
experimental.

Cheers!
#1108620#10
Date:
2025-07-01 16:49:04 UTC
From:
To:
Hello Sergei,

I haven't heard from upstream about a new planned version for NGspice
yet but let's forward your news to Holger Vogt from the NGspice team.
You changes will also affect Ubuntu at one day.

Am 01.07.25 um 18:22 schrieb Sergei Golovan:

@Holger
The patch Sergei is talking about can be found in the Debian BTS

https://bugs.debian.org/1108620

In detail in this URL

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?att=1;bug=1108620;filename=blt3.patch;msg=5

Maybe you already prepared in this direction in the upstream work of
ngspice?
#1108620#15
Date:
2025-07-01 18:54:03 UTC
From:
To:
Carsten,

the next ngspice release (45) is planned for end of July.

Up to now I did not consider any changes to the tclspice port.

I will have a look at the BLT 3 sources.

What about putting these changes into ngspice-46 (end of 2025)?

Best regards

Holger


Am 01.07.2025 um 18:49 schrieb Carsten Schoenert:
#1108620#20
Date:
2025-07-03 15:58:59 UTC
From:
To:
Hi, Holger, Carsten,

I'm sorry, when I prepared the patch, I minimized my own effort and didn't
bother to maintain compatibility with BLT 2. The problem with BLT 3 is that it
isn't released yet and I don't know when it'll be released. So,
currently keeping
ngspice compatible with BLT 2 is a must.

Also, my patch to ngspice relies on a bugfix to
https://sourceforge.net/p/blt/patches/46/
so it might be useless upstream before the patch there goes to the repository.

Anyway, I'm attaching a more complete version of the patch which doesn't break
compatibility with BLT 2. It might need a better way of finding blt.h
in the configure
script though.