Cygwin Tcl/Tk on Trial

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

After examining the facts of the case, I am hereby judging the Cygwin 
Tcl/Tk implementation to be unsuitable for use with Xconq.

It is found wanting because it does not provide an usable set of 
substitute functions for X11. Although some X11 functions can be faked 
with dummy implementations, such as is already done with 'XSetTile', 
'XFlush', and 'XSynchronize', there are others which cannot be faked so 
easily, such as 'XPutPixel' (from 'X11/Xutil.h'). The Cygwin Tcl/Tk 
implementation neither implements these functions (AFAICT), nor provides 
headers for them. And, of course, it is unacceptable to mix Windows 
Tcl/Tk and X11; the resulting Frankenstein does actually start (I tried 
it on a whim), but crashes the moment it calls one of the functions from 
the Cygwin X11 library.

By contrast, both the MinGW32 Tcl/Tk implementation and ActiveTcl 
provide their own X11 headers (and thus implementations as well), and 
both are completely usable by Xconq.

If the Tcl/Tk interface was to become independent of any direct accesses 
to X11 functions, we could then utilize the Cygwin Tcl/Tk as well. 
However, since that is not the reality, I am not going to make any 
further efforts to help Xconq build with Cygwin Tcl/Tk. I think it is 
sufficient that we already have two native Windows Tcl/Tk 
implementations that Tkconq can be built with.

Eric