[Plplot-devel] Status of tk, xwin, and tkwin

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

I have just completed a round of cvs commits that should substantially
improve the Unix configuration control over the tkwin driver.  There are
also some incomplete changes to allow tk, xwin, and tkwin to be dynamic
drivers.  These won't work without hand intervention at the moment
so to avoid them, turn off dynamic drivers.

Note the tkwin driver requires access to functions in plplotter.c. According
to Vince) plplotter.c absolutely depends on internal tcl/tk functions which
are declared in private tcl and tk headers (i.e. tkInt.h which in turn
indirectly includes all sorts of other private headers including tclInt.h).
Thus, to use tkwin, you will have to have access to a tcl/tk tarball or
private build or else your devel packages for tcl/tk must include access to
the internal tcl/tk headers.  The only distribution I am aware of that gives
access to the internal headers is Debian so I have set up the search patch
for tkInt.h and tclInt.h which includes the Debian location.  But if you
have your own special location for those headers, then you will have to
specify the environment variables TKPRIVATEINCDIR and TCLPRIVATEINCDIR
before you run configure in order to get plplotter.c built.

My configuration changes also include allowing the possibility of xwin, tk,
and tkwin to be dynamic drivers.  This should have no effect and everything
should work (including allowing you to play with the tkwin driver to your
heart's content) if you do not enable dynamic drivers.

However, if you do enable dynamic drivers, then the current status is you
will have to hand-link libplplot so that it links to tkd.drv, xwind.drv and
tkwind.drv. After that, everything should just work (yesterday's
breakthrough).

BTW, my style is to cvs commit many small separate changes with a relevant
log message for each rather than one huge commit with a log message that
necessarily must deal only in generalities.  So please bear with this work
in progress!  I plan to put off detailed testing until the end of this
series of changes, but at this stage the static driver builds should be fine
so let me know if you find any problems in that case.

The next item on the agenda is to automate the additional linking required
for the tk, xwin, and tkwin dynamic drivers.  After that, I plan to
implement splitting of the tcl/tk stuff from libplplot into libtclplplot.

Alan

email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902	FAX: 250-721-7715
snail-mail:
Dr. Alan W. Irwin
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055,
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6
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