[MACTCL] Re: [TCT] Call for maintainers

[Daniel A. S. <st...@ic...>]

Finally getting to this, sorry for the delay.

I'm volunteering for the two 'Macintosh Stuff' areas and generally as 
a helping hand for any file in the mac/ subdirectory.

The plan is to co-maintain the mac sources with Jim Ingham, I had 
informally agreed with him a while back to help out with mac code in 
Tcl and Tk and to officially volunteer once the call comes. I've been 
looking into mac specific issues in tcl and tk for some time now 
while working on Alpha and have recently done the mac 8.3.2 binary 
release with Jim's ok.

While a number of other functional areas in TIP 16 (I count 12) 
contain mac code, I don't feel I have the know-how or the time to 
take on the other platform's code that come alongside with it.

As a busy mac-centric person I'm not that interested in maintaining 
anything besides the mac code anyway, so I'm not terribly happy with 
the distribution of mac code among so many functional areas in TIP 
16, when it's quite likely that a lot of the maintainers are not 
going to have a mac with the latest compilers and are not going to be 
able to build and test the mac sources they are maintaining.

I think Jim made a similar point a while back already about Tk and TIP 23.
Anyway it's probably too late for me to complain about TIP 16 now, 
and TIP 23 looks a bit better in that respect, but I fear the whole 
mac sources situation is going to be somewhat of an organizational 
challenge.

Is there some concept of platform release managers planned? is there 
somebody among the maintainers or the TCT who will be responsible for 
building binary distributions? (I suppose I could volunteer for 
building the mac distribution if needed)

Cheers,

Daniel

da...@us...

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I'm still working (slowly) on a precise writeup of my changes to 
8.3.2 and 8.4, but just to illustrate my point, my current patch for 
Tcl 8.4 TOT for the mac touches the following files:

generic/tcl.h
generic/tclInt.decls
generic/tclMain.c
generic/tclStubInit.c
mac/MW_TclAppleScriptHeader.pch
mac/MW_TclHeader.pch
mac/MW_TclTestHeader.pch
mac/tclMac.h
mac/tclMacAppInit.c
mac/tclMacApplication.r
mac/tclMacChan.c
mac/tclMacCommonPch.h
mac/tclMacFCmd.c
mac/tclMacInt.h
mac/tclMacLibrary.c
mac/tclMacLibrary.r
mac/tclMacMath.h
mac/tclMacNotify.c
mac/tclMacOSA.c
mac/tclMacOSA.r
mac/tclMacPanic.c
mac/tclMacPort.h
mac/tclMacProjects.sea.hqx
mac/tclMacResource.r
mac/tclMacSock.c
mac/tclMacThrd.c
mac/tclMacUnix.c
mac/tclMacUtil.c

see http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~steffen/tcltk/ for the diffs and new 
files in a preliminary state (not 100% fresh anymore but they should 
give you an idea if you're interested).

while most of the changes are in tcl/mac, these files actually affect 
all of the following functional units:

Events:			_Notifier_
Channels:		_Built-in Channel Types_
Threads:
File System:		_File System Access_
Embedding Support:
Release Engineering:	_Portability Support_
Macintosh Stuff:	_[resource]_
Macintosh Stuff:	_Mac-Specific Files_
SHARED FILES

this is certainly not a typical patch, as I have changed a fair 
number of things in the mac build support that affect a lot of files 
(e.g. new compiler, shared runtime libraries, removed the need for 
OLDROUTINENAMES for Apple's headers, DLLEXPORT & DLLIMPORT now work 
as on Win32, fix for encoding problem due to bug in MacCVS Pro and 
more) which explains partially why so many files are involved but 
even so, too many generic functional areas are touched for mac only 
changes IMHO.

same analysis for my tk patches:

generic/tkInt.decls
generic/tkIntPlatDecls.h
generic/tkPointer.c
mac/MW_TkHeader.pch
mac/MW_TkOldImgHeader.h
mac/MW_TkTestHeader.pch
mac/tclets.r
mac/tkMac.h
mac/tkMacAppearanceStubs.c
mac/tkMacApplication.r
mac/tkMacButton.c
mac/tkMacFont.c
mac/tkMacInt.h
mac/tkMacLibrary.r
mac/tkMacMDEF.r
mac/tkMacMenu.c
mac/tkMacMenus.c
mac/tkMacPort.h
mac/tkMacProjects.sea.hqx
mac/tkMacResource.r
mac/tkMacScrlbr.c
mac/tkMacWindowMgr.c
mac/tkMacWm.c

which touch the following TIP 23 areas:

Low-level Tk functions: _Basic window manipulations_
Low-level Tk functions: _Macintosh window operations_
Widgets: _button, checkbutton, radiobutton, label_
Widgets: _menu, etc. (Macintosh)_
Widgets: _scrollbar_
Release Engineering:_Macintosh Configuration and Build Tools_
Shells:_Drag and Drop Tclets (Macintosh)_
Fonts:_Macintosh font support_
SHARED FILES

so things are a fair bit better for Tk, most heavily affected areas 
are mac specific.

-- 
** Daniel A. Steffen          **  "And now to something completely
** Department of Mathematics  **   different"    Monty Python
** Macquarie University       ** <mailto:st...@ma...>
** NSW 2109 Australia         ** <http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~steffen/>