Re: [MACTCL] How to move forward with Tk-Cocoa event loop issues

[Kevan H. <ha...@br...>]

Dear Kevin,

> What I'd like to do, instead, is assemble some best practices.

I find your argument convincing. As it is, my applications already have 
serious problems with the Tcl event loop, and the Tk/Carbon event loop, 
almost all of which I have worked around by trial and error through 
insertion of update, update idletasks, vwaits and after commands. These 
commands do not, in my experience, do exactly what the TclTk 
documentation tells me they should do, but they almost always seem to 
fix the problem.

Every now and then, however, there comes an event-loop problem that I 
can't fix. The screen freezes during TCPIP communication, for example, 
and these I have submitted as bug reports and they have been fixed. So I 
imagine that the same thing will happen with the Tk/Cocoa event loop.

If we have a list of best practices, then people like you, who end up 
doing the bug fixes, can first point to this list before you spend your 
time looking into something that is supposed to be a bug. Thus I think 
this list of best practices is a good idea, and I accept the compromise 
you propose.

 From your subsequent answer to Adrian:

 > And on
 > the other side, there are other folks in this community with more
 > expertise than me, but with less time and/or interest: they just want 
 > Tk to work but don't want to have to dig deeply into its internals.

Yup, that's me. You are maintaining this code and also using it 
yourself. Looking at your portfolio of applications, it seems to me that 
you are firmly invested in TclTk on the Mac. Your investment gives your 
proposal a guarantee in my mind.

Yours, Kevan

-- 
Kevan Hashemi, Electrical Engineer
Physics Department, Brandeis University
http://alignment.hep.brandeis.edu/