Re: Updated Tcl Tk and Tix

[Mumit Khan <khan at nanotech dot wisc dot edu>]

On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, Nicholas Wourms wrote:

> Chuck and I were just discussing this and we came up with some
> observations:
>
> 1)This package is way to big for one person to do alone.  I'm sure someone
> might me more receptive to the idea if you were still involved (which
> isn't clear from your message as to whether you would be).

As I mention it the README file provided with the patched Tcl/Tk, I simply
can't support it. The only reason I put it up for ftp is to make it
available for those who may need it. I can provide explanations for the
changes, but that's about it.

It's actually not that large -- the changes are usually quite
self-explanatory, and most of these changes have been in Cygwin's tcl/tk
releases from a long time (days of Ian Taylor and others hacking on Source
Navigator, and probably from even before that).

You'll notice that only Tcl has some non-trivial changes -- the rest of
the packages just needed configuration tweaks to build under Cygwin.

> 2)It probably would be best to wait until the new gcc-3.1 and binutils
> release comes out (any day now?).

I don't see why gcc-3.1 and a newer binutils release is relevant here.

> 3)The big question: right now (and in the future) the cygwin tk/tcl build
> will be mingw-ish (native windowing, not X windowing). Red Hat won't want
> to force its GNUpro customers to use a Xserver just to run gdb.  So, what
> *we* -- the net users -- really want is TWO tk/tcl's:  one that uses
> mingw/w32api, and another one that uses posix api/paths and whose tk uses
> X11R6.

There's probably just a handful of people using the XFree version of Tk
under Cygwin, and that's one of the reasons I never bothered to add it
to the configuration. I did do that a long time ago when I needed it for
the just the reason you mention. If you want to try this, here's a
starting point: Use --with-x when configuring; cd into the Unix directory
when you see --with-x specified, and build everything without -mwin32.
There needs to be a few other tweaks, but that's really the big part of
it. In a sense, we use the two Cygwin "personalities" -- a POSIX layer
with X11, and a POSIX layer with Windows GDI.

> 4)This will take a lot of time, discussion, planning, and implementation.

Given the very small number of users using X11 enabled Tk, I don't see why
this should hold up a package release for updated Tcl/Tk/etc. Assuming
someone steps forward as the package maintainer, the rest of it can be
added over time.

> I'd be willing to help, but unfortunately I have a few other projects on
> my plate, so there is no way I want to tackle that by myself, though I
> suspect that #3 could be fixed by removing os-centric defines and
> replacing with feature-centric defines (eg. -DUSE_POSIX_PATHS).  Chuck
> suggested not to stir up discussion on this, so until #2 is satisfied,
> I'll leave it at that.

I would first wait for a package maintainer(s) to take over, and then deal
with the rest of the issues as they come up.

Regards,
Mumit



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