Re: "wxt on Mac": news

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 30 March 2007 10:41, Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
> So there is one remaining thing to try, but this will involve more work on
> my part: changing the way wxt works on Unix and Mac and arrange it so that
> the main thread runs the event loop while the usual gnuplot command-line
> loop runs in the separate thread.

Won't this prevent switching to another interactive terminal type?

Sounds to me that Cocoa is broken by design.  Given this design limitation,
I suspect it would be easier/better to use the gnuplot+gnuplot_x11 model.
Instead of running wxt as a daughter thread, spawn a separate process
for which it is the main thread.

	Ethan

> Dear Mojca, Joe, and all gnuplot enthusiasts,
>=20
> Here are some news about the availability of the wxt terminal for the
> MacOS platform. I have had the chance to get my hands on my MacBook and I
> have worked a little bit on the issues you got when trying to use the wxt
> terminal.
>=20
> To sum up where we were last time we talked about it:
>=20
> - building seems to be ok. The most painful part is to build recent enough
> (i.e. using Fink) glib, cairo, pango & wxWidgets. Fortunately, this is
> almost to be done the Unix way, 'configure; make; make install'. The
> exceptions are to disable features for cairo so that it doesn't ask for
> Freetype or fontconfig (useless here).
>=20
> - executing gnuplot and trying to use wxt, you successfully get plot
> windows, but those seem to be "dead". The mouse changes to a colorful
> pinwheel, the buttons on the top (close, minimize, maximize) are grayed
> out, and you cannot grab the window to move it.
>=20
> - from my researches, "bundling" is necessary, but it didn't seem to
> change anything when done on gnuplot.
>=20
> So, I've investigated regarding this problem:
> - bundling is indeed necessary. I wrote a sample wxWidgets app, and tried
> to launch it without bundling it. It doesn't get the focus. BUT the mouse
> cursor stays the same, and the buttons on the top bar do work. So it's not
> really the root of the problem with the wxt terminal.
>=20
> - I tried on the sample app what is the second most important aspect of
> the wxt implementation: putting the event loop in a separate thread. And
> bingo ! I get the same problem as with wxt... Although the separate thread
> and its event loop are running, the latter does not process the window
> events. It turns out that this is a limitation of Cocoa app (MacOS
> programming toolkit):
> "The main thread of the application is responsible for handling events.
> The main thread is the one blocked in the run method of NSApplication,
> usually invoked in an application=92s main function. "
> (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Multithreading=
/articles/CocoaSafety.html)
>=20
> I've searched for this "run" method in the wxWidgets code, but could not
> find it. MacOS development involves a mixture of layers called Foundation,
> Cocoa and Carbon (like GLib, Cairo, GTK and friends) and I'm afraid this
> 'run' method is in fact hidden somewhere else. Anyway, I tried to do as
> much initialization as I could in the separate thread, but it didn't work
> either.
>=20
> So there is one remaining thing to try, but this will involve more work on
> my part: changing the way wxt works on Unix and Mac and arrange it so that
> the main thread runs the event loop while the usual gnuplot command-line
> loop runs in the separate thread. The challenge is to do that only when
> wxt_init() is called, not before (doing it at startup time is easy, but I
> don't feel like it would be the right way).
> (note that on Windows we don't have this problem because the fake terminal
> already has the event loop and runs gnuplot command loop inside it)
> (as far as aquaterm is concerned, it has another design again, something
> like the X11 terminal: the GUI is in a different program with its own loop
> and talking with gnuplot through some interprocess communication
> mechanism)
>=20
> If some of you feel some inspiration regarding this issue, I would
> appreciate to listen to them !
>=20
> Best regards,
>=20
> Timoth=E9e Lecomte
>=20
>=20
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>=20

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt            Courier Deliveries: 1959 NE Pacific
Dept of Biochemistry
Health Sciences Building
University of Washington - Seattle WA 98195-7742