Re: [MACTCL] ActiveState Tcl/Tk 8.5.18.0 and 8.6.4.0 is now out

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

On 4/30/15 5:56 AM, Kevin Walzer wrote:
> On 4/29/15 2:30 PM, Russell Owen wrote:
>> What is the state of the source code? Would you recommend using today's
>> master, or is there there pending work I should wait for or an older
>> commit that is especially trustworthy? I don't release new versions of
>> my application very often, so I can afford to wait for a "sweet spot" to
>> update Tcl/Tk.
>
> Work is pretty much done for the moment on big changes in Tk/Mac. A lot
> of the recent changes were being driven by Marc Culler's patches, and
> Marc seems satisfied with things now, as am I. I'd say it's safe to use
> the current trunk or tip of core-8-5-branch.

Thank you. I uploaded binaries to 
<http://www.astro.washington.edu/users/rowen/python/TclTk%208.5.18_2015-04-28_macosx10.6.zip>. 
These should work on MacOS X 10.6 and later. Users must manually move 
the frameworks to /Library/Frameworks.

I notice that normal buttons with text are now much less cramped, with 
spacing that is similar to unix. This is a definite improvement. It's 
too soon to say if window closing or scrolling will be a problem, but 
looking through the commit history I'm hopeful the scrolling glitch 
reported by one user is now fixed.

However, users beware: these latest changes introduce some significant 
differences between MacOS and linux, which makes cross-platform GUI 
design harder:
- Spacing for checkbuttons and radiobuttons with text is now much more 
generous on MacOS than on unix. Admittedly it is quite cramped on unix 
(as it was on MacOS before these recent changes).
- If there is no text (e.g. -text is not specified or is specified to be 
an empty string) then on unix no label is shown. On MacOS a big blank 
label is shown.

-- Russell