YouPlot
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red-data-tools
Provide binary for linux
It'd be great to have a way to try out this package without going through the ruby toolchain.
This package looks interesting, but I couldn't find a way to try it out. I've never worked with ruby/gems before, and I ran into some file permission issues trying to set that all up. Having the package available through a cross-platform package manger would certainly be convenient, but a simple binary on github would be very useful at the moment; especially for us non-ruby folk.
Relevant:
- https://github.com/red-data-tools/YouPlot/issues/33
- https://github.com/red-data-tools/YouPlot/issues/32#issuecomment-1382720370
Your suggestion is very interesting.
Let me tell you why YouPlot is implemented in Ruby. The reason is because Julia language enthusiast @mrkn recognized the value of UnicodePlot.jl and ported it to Ruby. Julia is not a general-purpose language and is not well-suited for creating command-line tools, so Ruby was used for building YouPlot.
Before creating YouPlot, I did some research to see if there were any similar tools out there. But to my surprise, I couldn't find anything similar. So I decided to create YouPlot myself. The idea behind it is simple, anyone could have thought of it.
What is really amazing about this project is not YouPlot but UnicodePlot. There are countless libraries that display charts in terminals, but most of them are not designed primarily for data analysis like UnicodePlot is. And if we can port UnicodePlot, we can easily create YouPlot binaries in any language.
I think Ruby is a scripting language like Python or Perl, so it is difficult to provide programs as binaries...
Instead of providing a single binary for Linux, providing a small docker image can be a reasonable way to reduce installation difficulty.
As per #33 being completed recently, you should now be able to use brew install youplot to get the binary and dependencies installed without needing Docker or installing gems yourself.
brew being a package manager for Mac and Linux: https://brew.sh/
https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/youplot
