[Gnuplot-info] broken gnuplot pipe with coloured scatter3 from octave

[Hans-Bernhard Bröker]

lynx.abraxas at freenet.de wrote:

> I don't get the errors due to an empty color spec though.
> Strangely on a different computer I sometimes still get the gnuplot errors.

Did you check that you're using the same versions of everything (OS, 
octave, gnuplot) on those two different computers?

> It  would  be nice if the gnuplot error were more meaningfull to help find the
> cause for it.

There really can't be.  For starters, we're talking about three separate 
issues with different likely reasons.  So there's no "the" cause for 
gnuplot to inform you about.

The first error being described most probably is caused by an I/O buffer 
limitation being hit somewhere between octave and the main gnuplot 
executable (pipe buffer, Windows message queue).  In effect, some of the 
data are getting garbled or lost on the way, and gnuplot tries to 
interpret remaining inline data (input lines containing of just numbers) 
as commands, which it rather obviously can't.  Given those 
circumstances, there really can't be a meaningful error message. 
There's no context left to reconstruct possible meaning from.

The broken pipe issue with binary data is probably either the same 
problem in a different disguise, or a generic incapability of the 
communication channel to handle binary data.  Hard to tell without at 
least knowing the OS platform and gnuplot version.

The third issue could be anything --- we gnuplot people don't generally 
know what those octave commands actually end up sending to gnuplot. 
Without that, there's nothing we can do to help.

> I couldn't get the hg sources compile because my autoconf is 2.59 

So what's keeping you from upgrading it?  2.61 has been around for well 
over two years now!