Re: [MACTCL] reinstalling after crashes...

[Daniel A. S. <st...@ic...>]

Andrew,

At 8:48 +0100 on 24/8/01, Andrew Wilson wrote:

>while testing some tcl/tk applications I sometimes run into a bug
>that is big enough to crash MacOS 9x - typically the window manager
>locks up, clicking on icons doesn't work, that sort of thing.
>Force Quit isn't enough to free up the system so eventually I have
>to reset the machine.

that's a pretty bad bug that shouldn't happen, I haven't seen 
anything of the sort using Mac Tcl/Tk with a variety of software, if 
you can give more explicit details about your crashes, I would be 
interested to see if I can reproduce them.

>Sometimes, after such a reset, an existing application built by
>the 'Drag & Drop Tclets' app will stop working.  eg, when running
>8.3.3 I'll sometimes see a dialog box saying that the application
>couldn't be run because tcl8.3 couldn't be found.  I check the file
>system and all the folders and libraries are in the usual place,
>nothing obviously missing.

I have seen this behaviour occasionally myself, it is due to a MacOS 
bug. There is a much easier fix, just move your 'Tool Command 
Language' folder out of your Extensions folder e.g. onto the desktop 
and then drop it right back into Extensions... that fixes things for 
me. (I think the bug is due to code fragment manager caches to shared 
libraries getting corrupted when aliases to shared libraries on 
volumes other than the startup volume are involved, so another 
possible workaround is to copy the actual libraries into 'Tool 
Command Language', replacing the aliases. I have also noticed a 
dependency on File Sharing, when it is enabled the problem seems to 
occur more often)

>I've found that uninstalling the 8.3.3 distribution and then
>re-installing it solves the problem.  After re-installing, the
>existing application built by the 'Drag & Drop Tclets' app will
>work again.  So, ok, sometimes re-installing helps.
>
>About uninstalling...  I'm new to Macintosh so I didn't know about
>the implicit Restart required when uninstalling software.  The VISE
>uninstaller doesn't actually delete files, instead it moves them
>into invisible folders and signals the OS that it should *really*
>delete the folder the next time the machine boots up.  The VISE
>uninstaller doesn't say "you must restart to make these changes
>take effect", but it would be helpful if it did.  I found that
>nievely uninstalling and then immediately installing tcl8.3.3 (no
>reset) wasn't enough to fix the "tcl8.3 couldn't be found" error-dialog
>problem.

you don't necessarily need to use the uninstaller to uninstall 
Tcl/Tk, you can just drag your Tcl/Tk folder and the 'Tool Command 
Language' Folder to the Trash and empty, no restart should be 
necessary. I didn't realize the VISE installer had this limitation, 
alas the uninstaller part of VISE isn't configurable, so I can't 
really do anything about that for the next release...

Cheers,

Daniel
-- 
** Daniel A. Steffen          **  "And now to something completely
** Department of Mathematics  **   different"    Monty Python
** Macquarie University       ** <mailto:st...@ma...>
** NSW 2109 Australia         ** <http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~steffen/>