Bugs in gnuplot provided with blueCFD-Core 2017-2

[wyldckat]

The problem originates from the Gnuplot installation that is provided with MSys2. The following documented issues came #78:

1. The help command within gnuplot does not work and always fails with this error:

   gnuplot
   help
   C:/building/msys64/mingw64/share/gnuplot/5.2/gnuplot.gih: No such file or directory
   

2. The command line interface is broke, for both gnuplot and wgnuplot, namely:

   • It does not provide the prompt text, even though it does accept input and gives output when asked.

   • wgnuplot gives the prompt on the mintty window, instead of in the wgnuplot's own window.

[wyldckat]

The original author (who in the meantime unregistered from github) had written the following answer:

a workaround could be:

1. uninstall gnuplot from msys2:
   pacman -R mingw-w64-x86_64-gnuplot

2. compile or download an appropriate windows binary archive, like from the following hyperlink:
   https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot/files/gnuplot/5.2.7/gp527-win32-mingw.7z/download

3. and extract the contained gnuplot directory into the blueCFD-Core-2017/AddOns folder

4. append into blueCFD-Core-2017/msys64/home/ofuser/.bashrc the following row:
   export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/AddOns/gnuplot/bin

5. refresh the path or restart blueCFD-Core_MSys2_mingw64.bat

on my side this trick works fine also with integrated postPorocessing tools,
as per foamMonitor (...substituting the line:
set term x11 1 font "helvetica,17" linewidth 1.5 persist noraise
with:
set term windows 1 font "helvetica,17" linewidth 1.5
;-)

My followup answer was:

Many thanks! Although I wanted to keep things as directly dependent on MSys2 as possible, to minimize the packages that we need to provide in the installer.

Essentially the target objective is to allow users to start with a new Msys2 installation and use it as if it was a Linux Distribution and use the package manager to get our builds of OpenFOAM... although I still haven't had the time needed to work on that :(