Re: [Swarm-Support] Using Aqua tcl/tk on Mac OS X?

[Russell Standish]

Just a short comment on this, based on the Mac OSX Ecolab port. Ecolab
will build and run quite happily with Aqua TCL/TK, but obviously lacks
certain functionality that depend on BLT. It also build and runs quite
happily using TCL/TK 8.3 + BLT using XDarwin.

It looked like TCL/TK changed the TCL API by changing many non const
arguments to const arguments, and getting code to compile using both
APIs is quite kludgy, and not exactly documented (the documentation
refers to the old API). BLT will need to be adapted to the new API (or
even both).

I was rather disappointed at this action by the TCL/TK developers -
they should at least increment the major version number when changing
APIs. They did it once before when going from TCL/TK 8.0 to TCL/TK 8.1
(I think it was), but that was a relatively mild change.

Its a real headache for me, as I'm supporting TCL/TK 8.x, where x
could be 0 (for Cygwin), 3 (Linux, usually) or 4 (Aqua TCL). I have at
least made the sensible decision to drop support for TCL 7.x, which I
was carrying at one time...

                                                Cheers

Bill Northcott wrote:
> 
> The problem is to build BLT.  I had a go with AquaTcl/Tk 8.4.1 but it was 
> too hard.
> 
> Tk extensions tend to make direct calls to X11 routines.  AquaTk emulates 
> many of these but not enough for BLT.
> Also the BLT maintainer is less than responsive.  I sent him a set of 
> patches to get BLT to build against X11 on MacOS X.  I got no 
> acknowledgement and they do not seem to have been incorporated in the 
> source code.
> 
> There is a new Tcl/Tk 8.4.2 version available, but although it adds quite 
> a few more X11 functions, but I gather from the mail lists that they are 
> stil not enough for BLT, which seems to be one of the worst Tk extensions 
> for making X11 calls.
> 
> You are welcome to have a go at porting BLT and/or modifying AquaTcl/Tk. 
> It would be great if it worked.
> 
> An alternative track which is being worked on is to move the whole GUI to 
> GNUstep.  It is a big job would potentially make porting easier to non X11 
> systems.
> 
> Finally there is not a big incentive to move away from X11 now that Apple 
> have produced a proper accelerated server and made it fairly clear that it 
> will be supported into the future.  It is being used by commercial 
> products like Matlab.
> 
> Bill Northcott
> 
> address@hidden wrote on 09/04/2003 08:43:48 PM:
> 
> > Some time ago, I saw that there was a release of the aqua port of tcl/tk
> > made available from the software download page of Apple's web site. Is 
> it
> > possible to use this version of tcl/tk with the OS X version of Swarm?
> 
> > Just curious.
> 
> > Jason
> 
> > _______________________________________________
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> > address@hidden
> > http://www.swarm.org/mailman/listinfo/support
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> 



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A/Prof Russell Standish                  Director
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