Re: [TCLCORE] CFV: TIP 733, Add accessibility/screen reader support to Tk

[Kevin W. <kw...@co...>]

Hi Jan,

I'll be blunt: I hate dealing with the test suite and prefer to interact 
with it as little as possible. I don't understand it very well and find 
situations such as this very frustrating because the errors appear so 
far removed from what I am working on. Nonetheless, I have taken a look 
and can say that whatever is causing these errors, it is not from 
another branch. So, by default, it must be me.

Here are my observations based on your reports:

On 11/7/25 3:52 PM, Jan Nijtmans wrote:
> See:
>      <https://github.com/tcltk/tk/actions?query=branch%3Acore-tka11y>
>
>
> On MacOS:
> safe.test
> ==== safe-1.1 Safe Tk loading into an interpreter FAILED
> ==== Contents of test case:
> safe::loadTk [safe::interpCreate a]
> safe::interpDelete a
> set x {}
> return $x
> ---- Test generated error; Return code was: 1
> ---- Return code should have been one of: 0 2
> ---- errorInfo: Can't find a usable tk.tcl in the following directories:
> {$p(:12:)}
> .......
> Tests ended at 2025-11-07 08:00:25 UTC
> all.tcl: Total 10050 Passed 8791 Skipped 1223 Failed 36
> Sourced 98 Test Files.
> Files with failing tests: safe.test safePrimarySelection.test tk.test
I can see this error on macOS, but it baffles me how the accessibility 
code could be corrupting the tk_library path. When we saw this error on 
prior tests just creating a child interp, you helped me add some code to 
accessibility.tcl that essentially returned an empty command set for 
child interpreters. That doesn't seem to be good enough here. I also 
tried skipping loading accessibility.tcl altogether if we were in a safe 
interp, but that doesn't have any effect. You had mentioned that this 
error was probably fixable - I would love any ideas you might have.
>
>
> With --disable-aqua:
> DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH="`pwd`:/Users/runner/work/tk/tk/tcl/unix:${DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH}";
> export DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH;
> TCL_LIBRARY=/Users/runner/work/tk/tk/tcl/library; export TCL_LIBRARY;
> TK_LIBRARY=/Users/runner/work/tk/tk/tk/library; export TK_LIBRARY;
> ./tktest /Users/runner/work/tk/tk/tk/unix/../tests/all.tcl
> /bin/sh: line 1: 19218 Segmentation fault: 11 ./tktest
> /Users/runner/work/tk/tk/tk/unix/../tests/all.tcl
> make: *** [test-classic] Error 139
> killing process 19155...
> Error: Failure during Test (classic)
> Error: Process completed with exit code 1.
I'm inclined to call this an invalid test because accessiblity will 
never run under XQuartz on macOS - the dependencies such as dbus just 
aren't there.
>
> On Linux, with --enable-symbols:
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH="`pwd`:/home/runner/work/tk/tk/tcl/unix:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}";
> export LD_LIBRARY_PATH;
> TCL_LIBRARY=/home/runner/work/tk/tk/tcl/library; export TCL_LIBRARY;
> TK_LIBRARY=/home/runner/work/tk/tk/tk/library; export TK_LIBRARY;
> ./tktest /home/runner/work/tk/tk/tk/unix/../tests/all.tcl
> make: *** [Makefile:734: test-classic] Segmentation fault (core dumped)
> Error: Process completed with exit code 2.

I am not able to reproduce this. The test suite runs just fine on my 
Debian installation. If I got this a bug report, I would close it as 
"works for me." So I'm not sure what to do here.

I'm eager to get this merged to trunk, so thank you for your insights.

--Kevin