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Re: ATTENTION: Tcl/Tk transition


On Sun, 2011-10-30 at 00:53 -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 06:31:59PM -0500, Reini Urban wrote:
> >On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Charles Wilson wrote:
> >> in the gitk thread above, Reini Urban, the cygwin perl and parrot
> >> maintainer, was vehemently against switching tcltk from GDI to X11. ?I
> >> wonder if his opinion has changed in the past year...
> >
> >No, I'm still against it, but in minority.
> >I tried to fix it, but ran out of time.
> >
> >Maybe later I can come up with a tk/tcl-native.
> 
> I don't see why you need a tcl-native but it should be possible to use
> the Windows version of tk to do Windows-native GUI stuff without relying
> on X11.  The trick is getting that + Cygwin paths, signals, etc.  to
> play together.

Please don't.  The problem with a GDI Tk is not only getting it to work
properly, but how it interoperates with other (X11) GUI software.  Some
examples from Ports:

* Pidgin (a GTK2/X11 app) has a Tcl scripting plugin which also uses Tk.
Mixing an X11 app with a GDI plugin is a sure recipe for disaster.

* PyOpenGL is used by several Python libraries, such as PyGame,
PyGtkGLExt, and wxPython, all of which are X11-based.  But PyOpenGL
includes a Tkinter/Togl interface as well.  If Tk is GDI-based, then so
will Tkinter have to be, but PyOpenGL can't bind both GLX and WGL at the
same time.

This is just the beginning.  Mixing GDI and X11 just doesn't work, and
since X11 is used for all other GUIs on Cygwin, so must Tk.


Yaakov



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