[MACTCL] Menubutton and Checkbutton width wrong on MacOS X

[Russell E. O. <ro...@uw...>]

I've reported these as bugs and been told they are best discussed before 
being changed, so here goes:

On MacOS X if one specifies a nonzero width (in chars) for a checkbutton 
or menubutton, the number of chars that will be displayed is far less 
than the width. This is a change from Tcl/Tk 8.4 to 8.5 and I'm very 
confused as to why this occurred and why not fix it?

In Tcl/Tk 8.4 when a widget took a width parameter measured in chars you 
could count on the width showing roughly that many chars. Now in 8.5 you 
cannot. (I have not tried 8.6, but I'll be surprised if it's different 
than 8.5).

This ruined the appearance of much of my application until I hacked 
around it. Fortunately I subclass checkbutton and menubutton so I could 
apply the hack in just one place. But I hate to leave things like that 
in my code.

Would it be OK to change Tcl/Tk so that the width option on these 
widgets actually does specify roughly how many chars could be displayed? 
Its a simple change, though admittedly one that requires a Mac-specific 
branch. I guess an obvious question is how widely others are already 
hacking around this issue. (I assume most users use width=0 and thus 
don't see this bug).

My use case: often I have widgets that can display one of several 
strings. In that case I usually prefer to specify a width sufficient 
that the longest string can be displayed. That way the containing window 
retains its size.

-- Russell

P.S. the bug numbers are:
3580194 for menubutton
not yet reported for checkbutton, given the cold reception to the 
menubutton bug