[MACTCL] No Tk menubar in Leopard?

[Lloyd W. <L....@su...>]

Hi,

I've run into Tk menubar problems under Leopard with an application I maintain - it's fine under Tiger 10.4, but under 10.5/XCode 3.0, no menubar is shown. I've described the problem below - bug 5628569 in Apple's Bug Reporter. (Hopefully this will also raise visibility of the fact that Tcl/Tk under Leopard is out of date, and in need of a refresh.)

Installing Daniel Steffen's recent 8.5b3 dmg didn't help me here - same problem. It's got to be Leopard...

cheers,

L.

04-Dec-2007 01:38 PM Lloyd Wood:
SUMMARY:
Tcl/Tk applications that work fine in 10.4 Tiger can't be used in 10.5 Leopard, due to not being able to take control of the menubar to show their own menus.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:
Example application is SaVi 1.3.2, available from http://savi.sf.net/ Download this to your XCode-enabled Mac. On 10.4 Tiger:
tar xvf savi1.3.2a-release.tar
cd savi.1.3.2
make ARCH=macosx
./savi and you'll have a working program. (Views menu/Coverage shows it off.)

On 10.5 Leopard:
tar xvf savi1.3.2a-release.tar
cd savi1.3.2
vi src/Makefile and edit \n in line creating version.c to be \\\n - do this for both \n occurrences. Build has changed slightly on Leopard - gcc's tools seem more fussy. This prevents complaints about creating version.c
make ARCH=macosx
./savi and you'll have the same Tk window - but the menubar you saw in Tiger will be entirely absent. (You won't be able to select the Views menu or bring up the Coverage panel.)

EXPECTED RESULTS:
Working menubar for application in 10.5 Leopard, just like 10.4 Tiger.

ACTUAL RESULTS:
No menubar created for the SaVi application in 10.5. Previous application retains its menubar headings in menubar, but they are unresponsive while the Tk application is frontmost.

REGRESSION:
Yes. This worked fine in 10.4 Tiger. What's odder is that the versions of Tcl/Tk in 10.4/10.5 (Xcode 2.5/3.0) appear to be the same - it's quite an old version of Tcl/Tk, which hasn't been revised or updated for the later Xcode or OS. So, since the Tcl/Tk package is unchanged, it's a definite OS regression. Apart from fixing this regression, it seems XCode's Tcl/Tk  really needs an update to 8.4.16 stable or so.

NOTES:
I was able to control the menubar while playing around with wish's command line; wish seems to have control under Leopard where the tested application does not. Also installed Tcl/Tk 8.5b3 under Leopard. Same problem, only under Leopard. Tiger is fine. Using Leopard on a 3-day-old Santa Rosa Macbook.

SaVi satellite constellation visualization: http://savi.sf.net/

<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><L....@su...>