Re: [Plplot-devel] tk driver

[Vince D. <vi...@sa...>]

On Fri, 5 Jul 2002, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> What is the difference between this driver, and say the tk one?  I might
> even be interested in doing the configuration changes that would be required
> to get this driver to work under Linux simply as an alternative testbed to
> its normal windows environment.  However, is there any other Linux
> motivation beyond that?  Would we be able to run a wider variety of demos or
> a different style of demos?  Also, on the other side of the coin would this
> driver require TEA to be working?

On Unix the tkwin driver is, indeed, very similar to the tk one (since it
is derived directly from it).  Main differences are:

(i) some bug fixes (particularly in initialisation, creation and
destruction under a variety of circumstances).
(ii) if you compile with 'USE_TCL_STUBS' and 'USE_TK_STUBS' defined, then
the shared library you produce can be loaded into _any_ tk interpreter
from 8.1 onwards (no recompilation necessary).
(iii) you can then use the extended 'Plplotwin' widget (in
bindings/tk-x-plat) which is quite nice.
(iv) in principle 'plserver' and executables like that can be replaced by
a simple script which is invoked by an ordinary 'wish' interpreter.  (i.e.
you don't need to compile a whole bunch of different executables for each
different platform).  However this bit would require a tcl script called
'plserver' which mimics plserver to be written.

Depending on your usage, none of the above may be compelling.  For people
on Mac OS, Mac OS X, Windows, of course there is no other 'tk' option, so
'tkwin' provides something very valuable.

The 'TEA' build process is not necessary for any of this.

cheers,

Vince.