tcl-core — Tcl Core Team discussions about Tcl development

Re: [TCLCORE] Tk Aqua future on Tiger

[Lars H. <Lar...@re...>]

dg...@ni... skrev:
> With Patch 2794032 applied and a Tk 8.5.8 release
> containing it, then a script application that needed
> to continue to support Tiger could do so with a
> 
>    package require Tk 8.5.0-8.6
> 
> when the app detects it is running on Tiger and just
> 
>    package require Tk 8.5.0
> 
> in other environments.  The special requirement for
> Tiger is only necessary as protection against a Tk 8.6
> that might somehow get installed on a Tiger system
> even though it doesn't work there.

Surely protection against *that* should be the responsibility of the 
package indexing system rather than each and every application. It's 
just a matter of making the Tk_Init of a CocoaTk 8.6 throw an error 
when called under 10.4, is it not?

Lars Hellström

Re: [TCLCORE] Tk Aqua future on Tiger

[<lm...@bi...>]

> With Patch 2794032 applied and a Tk 8.5.8 release
> containing it, then a script application that needed
> to continue to support Tiger could do so with a
> 
>    package require Tk 8.5.0-8.6

That's a nice idea, and we considered that as well.  However, Tk is showing
signs of life (png stuff, etc) and I think most people want that stuff (we
certainly do).
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com

[TCLCORE] Tk Aqua future on Tiger

[<dg...@ni...>]

I wanted to offer a possible support
path for those with users on Tiger
(Mac OSX 10.4) who wish to use Tcl 8.6,
and need to use Tk Aqua as well.

As recently mentioned here, the plan is
for Tk Aqua version 8.6 to shift to an
implementation on Cocoa, and the new
implementation also adds a requirement of
at least Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5).  Those
still using Tiger would be left with
only Tk 8.5.* to work with.

My sense is that the biggest problem with
this situation for the Tiger users is that
by getting stuck with Tk 8.5.*, the
implication is that they are also stuck
with Tcl 8.5.* and have to give up the
new features arriving in Tcl 8.6.  This
is especially unwelcome for developers who
have been working with Tcl 8.6 features in
alpha/beta state and have come to rely on
them.  My sense (possibly completely wrong)
is that there is much less loss within Tk
itself getting stuck with version 8.5.  Meaning
no disrespect to those who have added features
to Tk 8.6, there's just not a large number
of them, especially when specifically considering
their impact in a Tiger environment (corrections
welcome).

So, from that perspective, the key step to mitigate
the loss to Tiger users is to break the linkage
between Tk 8.5 and Tcl 8.5.  That's what Tk Patch
2794032 does.  Apply it to the core-8-5-branch of
Tk and the resulting sources produce a Tk 8.5 library
that will happily [load] into a Tcl 8.6 interp.

The patch is simple.  All it is doing is removing
some defensive programming which forbade that combination
based on a principle of an abundance of caution that
changes in Tcl 8.6 *might* break Tk 8.5.  We're late
enough in Tcl 8.6 development now to have good
confidence that's not going to happen, so a Tk 8.5
that assumes [load]ing into any Tcl 8.5+ interp will
work makes sense.

With Patch 2794032 applied and a Tk 8.5.8 release
containing it, then a script application that needed
to continue to support Tiger could do so with a

   package require Tk 8.5.0-8.6

when the app detects it is running on Tiger and just

   package require Tk 8.5.0

in other environments.  The special requirement for
Tiger is only necessary as protection against a Tk 8.6
that might somehow get installed on a Tiger system
even though it doesn't work there.  An app willing
to risk an assumption that won't happen could get
by with no changes at all.

Hope that's a useful contribution to the controversy.

DGP

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Jeff H. <je...@ac...>]

On 19/05/2009 11:14 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 11:09:03AM -0700, Jeff Hobbs wrote:
>> On 19/05/2009 10:55 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
>>> BTW, the distribution of our customer's usage of macos is:
>>>
>>> MacOS/X 10.5  26%
>>> MacOS/X 10.4  66%
>>> MacOS/X 10.3   2%
>>> MacOS/X 10.2   5%
>>>
>>> I'm surprised to see the 10.[23] holdouts, but not at all surprised at the
>>> 10.4 vs 10.5 distribution.
>> A comparative number based on recent visits to a typical section of the 
>> ActiveState website (from gAnalytics):
>>
>> 1. Intel 10.5  14,169 79.06% 	
>> 2. Intel 10.4   1,042  5.81% 	
>> 3. PPC 10.4       836  4.66% 	
>> 4. Intel          797  4.45% 	
>> 5. PPC 10.5       729  4.07% 	
>> 6. PPC            330  1.84% 	
>> 7. Intel 10.6      17  0.09% 	
>> 8. 68K              1  0.01%
>>
>> Go Mac Classic!
> 
> Those are pretty different numbers, you are counting web surfers.  I'm
> counting people who actually have installed our product.  Doesn't 
> activestate have those sorts of numbers?  There is a big difference 
> between looky loos and real customers.

You are right that they are web browsing folk.  One point to note is 
that we recently (6 months ago) dropped 10.3 support across the board 
(without a single complaint that I'm aware of), so that will self-select 
to some extent, although they might not know that until they hit the 
sysreqs page.  Our licensing doesn't require server callback, so it's 
hard to separate out exact versions on installs, but if I actually go to 
the analytics directly on our download site, the 10.5 number hits 87%, 
though again that is web hits and not a direct correlation to the 
platform being downloaded (these are just the easiest to browse through).

Jeff

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[<lm...@bi...>]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 11:09:03AM -0700, Jeff Hobbs wrote:
> On 19/05/2009 10:55 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >BTW, the distribution of our customer's usage of macos is:
> >
> >MacOS/X 10.5  26%
> >MacOS/X 10.4  66%
> >MacOS/X 10.3   2%
> >MacOS/X 10.2   5%
> >
> >I'm surprised to see the 10.[23] holdouts, but not at all surprised at the
> >10.4 vs 10.5 distribution.
> 
> A comparative number based on recent visits to a typical section of the 
> ActiveState website (from gAnalytics):
> 
> 1. Intel 10.5  14,169 79.06% 	
> 2. Intel 10.4   1,042  5.81% 	
> 3. PPC 10.4       836  4.66% 	
> 4. Intel          797  4.45% 	
> 5. PPC 10.5       729  4.07% 	
> 6. PPC            330  1.84% 	
> 7. Intel 10.6      17  0.09% 	
> 8. 68K              1  0.01%
> 
> Go Mac Classic!

Those are pretty different numbers, you are counting web surfers.  I'm
counting people who actually have installed our product.  Doesn't 
activestate have those sorts of numbers?  There is a big difference 
between looky loos and real customers.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Jeff H. <je...@ac...>]

On 19/05/2009 10:55 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> BTW, the distribution of our customer's usage of macos is:
> 
> MacOS/X 10.5  26%
> MacOS/X 10.4  66%
> MacOS/X 10.3   2%
> MacOS/X 10.2   5%
> 
> I'm surprised to see the 10.[23] holdouts, but not at all surprised at the
> 10.4 vs 10.5 distribution.

A comparative number based on recent visits to a typical section of the 
ActiveState website (from gAnalytics):

1. Intel 10.5  14,169 79.06% 	
2. Intel 10.4   1,042  5.81% 	
3. PPC 10.4       836  4.66% 	
4. Intel          797  4.45% 	
5. PPC 10.5       729  4.07% 	
6. PPC            330  1.84% 	
7. Intel 10.6      17  0.09% 	
8. 68K              1  0.01%

Go Mac Classic!

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[<lm...@bi...>]

BTW, the distribution of our customer's usage of macos is:

MacOS/X 10.5  26%
MacOS/X 10.4  66%
MacOS/X 10.3   2%
MacOS/X 10.2   5%

I'm surprised to see the 10.[23] holdouts, but not at all surprised at the
10.4 vs 10.5 distribution.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com

Re: [TCLCORE] question about the default tcl/tk widget colors on Linux

[Ivica I. B. <ic...@vt...>]

Many thanks for all the help in this matter. Apologies for also cluttering
the list with an apparently OT question--when I looked at the available
tcl/tk mailing lists this one seemed closest to what I was hoping to ask.

Best wishes,

Ico

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pat Thoyts [mailto:pat...@us...]
> Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2009 12:12 PM
> To: Ivica Ico Bukvic
> Cc: tcl...@li...
> Subject: Re: [TCLCORE] question about the default tcl/tk widget colors on
> Linux
> 
> Ivica Ico Bukvic <ic...@vt...> writes:
> 
> >I am trying to alter the default background color of the "clam" theme.
> >Since I was at first unable to figure out how to do this on the existing
> >loaded theme, I decided to copy code found on the following page
> >http://paste.tclers.tk/618 and change its color values. While this
> >changes default background color of popup windows and scrollbars, it has
> >apparently no effect on widgets such as menu and/or frame. I suspect
> >this may be because menu and frame are not ttk-aware. If so, what would
> >be the right way to do this?
> >
> >I also saw somewhere in code following statement:
> >
> >. configure -background "#ece7e3"
> >
> >This however has no effect either.
> >
> >Any help in this matter, particularly working example code, would be
> >most appreciated!
> 
> This list is for discussion of the language development. You should
> make these requests to tcl comp.lang.tcl newsgroup.
> 
> Only widgets in the ttk namespace are themed widgets. There is no
> themed toplevel so the main window you get will not respond to theme
> changes.
> 
> Instead you should pack a ttk::frame into the main window and put
> everything else in that.
>   ttk::frame .main
>   pack .main -fill both -expand 1
> 
> If you want to change the theme colour your code you should probably
> define a new theme then use ttk::style theme use myclam
> but
>   ttk::style configure . -background red
> would change the default background for the current theme to red.
> However it wouldn;t change things that have already been defined with
> the original colour. So copy the clamTheme.tcl file and edit it to
> generate a new custom version and load that
>  source myclamtheme.tcl
>  ttk::style theme use myclam
> 
> --
> Pat Thoyts                            http://www.patthoyts.tk/
> PGP fingerprint 2C 6E 98 07 2C 59 C8 97  10 CE 11 E6 04 E0 B9 DD

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Michael K. <mi...@mu...>]

FWIW (not much, since our Mac user base is small and we're in no rush to 
upgrade to Tcl/Tk 8.6), we're still on 10.3, mostly for lacking 
time/reason to upgrade.  But we're also still on Tcl/Tk 8.4.x (and still 
using separate tile and tkpng), so 8.6 not being compatible isn't likely 
to affect us for quite a while.

We tend to lag a a fair bit in moving to new Tcl/Tk minor versions in part 
to ensure one of our products (which is a binary package for Tcl) is still 
usable (stubs-compatible) by customers with older Tcl/Tk versions.  Might 
be different if the stubs mechanism had a way to build against a newer 
version of Tcl/Tk but target an older version (e.g., #define what version 
you want to target, and have stub APIs of later versions hidden from the 
compiler by #if/#endif wrappers so you get an error compiling your package 
if you try to use an API that didn't exist yet in the target version). 
But that's a big digression from the topic at hand.

--
Michael Kirkham
President & CEO
Muonics, Inc.
http://www.muonics.com/

On Sun, 17 May 2009, Larry McVoy wrote:

> Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 15:04:32 -0700
> From: Larry McVoy <lm...@bi...>
> To: Daniel A. Steffen <da...@us...>
> Cc: tcl mac <tc...@li...>,
>     Tcl Core <tcl...@li...>
> Subject: Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD
> 
> The issue for us is not that carbon is going away, it's that 10.4 support
> is going away.  I'm perfectly happy to go through the growing pains of
> moving over to the Cocoa based aqua toolkit.
>
> What I'm not happy about is dropping 10.4 support.  10.4 is still an
> actively supported release, it was a good release, and as a vendor it
> is not my place to tell people to get off a platform before the platform
> is end of lifed.
>
> One of tcl/tk's claims to fame is backwards compat and platform support.
> Dropping 10.4 seems to run counter to the goals of the system.
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial
> Check out the new simplified licensing option that enables
> unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine
> for externally facing server and web deployment.
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects
> _______________________________________________
> Tcl-Core mailing list
> Tcl...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tcl-core
>

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Daniel A. S. <da...@us...>]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 00:16, Daniel A. Steffen
<da...@us...> wrote:
> they may not be that large, I haven't looked into it frankly. Feel
> free to have someone at bitmover look into it, I can't justify
> spending time on it.

I looked into it briefly, unfortunately as suspected it's not looking
good, with the following small patch (backporting some types)
    http://www.categorifiedcoder.info/tcltk/tk-de-carbon-10.4.diff
you'll get the following error log:
   http://www.categorifiedcoder.info/tcltk/tk-de-carbon-10.4.log
(about 100 errors and 100 warnings)

the most serious of these is the unavailability of CoreText on 10.4,
i.e. the tkMacOSXFont.c errors.
This means the total rewrite of the text renderer to CoreText and font
handling to NSFont that this represents is not available on 10.4. This
was at least one month fulltime work to get right...

To add support for 10.4 probably the existing ATSUI renderer would
somehow have to be glued back in and amalgamated with the new font
handling (native widgets, menus etc also use the NSFont handling so it
would need to be there even on 10.4)

This would certainly not be a small project, and definitely not
something I could take on at present (even as paywork). Benny, the
original author of the ATSUI renderer might conceivably be somebody to
ask...

even with that, there is no guarantee that there won't be some other
serious problem that is not as easy to tell from the error log...

> FWIW I'm also quite happy to continue with the status quo, i.e.
> maintain the cocoa port in the gihub fork and let the tk/macosx code
> in CVS bitrot away, I won't be doing any more work on it, I haven't
> touched it since last August as is (nor has anybody else).

if the cocoa port is merge in, at this point, I think the only
feasible option for continued 10.4 support is to maintain a parallel
sourcebase with the existing carbon code.
If the general consensus is that this is the way to go, cognizant of
the fact that I won't be able to maintain it, and that it may break
soon if no other maintainer steps forward, I can look into setting
that up, but it will take some time.

Anyway, I've run out of free time to spend on Tk this week, so the
merge won't happen before next weekend at the earliest, so there is
some time to hash this out.

Cheers,

Daniel

--
** Daniel A. Steffen                   **
** <mailto:da...@us...>  **

Re: [TCLCORE] [MACTCL] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Donal K. F. <don...@ma...>]

Adrian Robert wrote:
> Are there / will there be backports of the PNG and font chooser  
> features (to be) introduced in 8.6 to 8.5?  It would be nice to bring  
> those features to Tiger users.

The font chooser should be easy to backport; it's pretty isolated from
the rest of Tk. The PNG support is trickier, since it builds on top of
Tcl's embedding of zlib, though just including tkpng would work.

Actually making any of these things happen, that simply requires someone
to do the work.

Donal.

Re: [TCLCORE] question about the default tcl/tk widget colors on Linux

[Pat T. <pat...@us...>]

Ivica Ico Bukvic <ic...@vt...> writes:

>I am trying to alter the default background color of the "clam" theme.
>Since I was at first unable to figure out how to do this on the existing
>loaded theme, I decided to copy code found on the following page
>http://paste.tclers.tk/618 and change its color values. While this
>changes default background color of popup windows and scrollbars, it has
>apparently no effect on widgets such as menu and/or frame. I suspect
>this may be because menu and frame are not ttk-aware. If so, what would
>be the right way to do this?
>
>I also saw somewhere in code following statement:
>
>. configure -background "#ece7e3"
>
>This however has no effect either.
>
>Any help in this matter, particularly working example code, would be
>most appreciated!

This list is for discussion of the language development. You should
make these requests to tcl comp.lang.tcl newsgroup.

Only widgets in the ttk namespace are themed widgets. There is no
themed toplevel so the main window you get will not respond to theme
changes.

Instead you should pack a ttk::frame into the main window and put
everything else in that.
  ttk::frame .main
  pack .main -fill both -expand 1

If you want to change the theme colour your code you should probably
define a new theme then use ttk::style theme use myclam
but
  ttk::style configure . -background red
would change the default background for the current theme to red.
However it wouldn;t change things that have already been defined with
the original colour. So copy the clamTheme.tcl file and edit it to
generate a new custom version and load that
 source myclamtheme.tcl
 ttk::style theme use myclam

-- 
Pat Thoyts                            http://www.patthoyts.tk/
PGP fingerprint 2C 6E 98 07 2C 59 C8 97  10 CE 11 E6 04 E0 B9 DD

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

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

Youness Alaoui wrote:
> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 06:12:25PM -0400, Kevin Walzer wrote:

> 
> But does Apple dropping support for a platform mean that
> everyone else should drop support for it ? Microsoft dropped
> support for windows 95 so long ago, but people are still
> using it, and we, as software developers should still give
> support to those people who want to keep using an
> unsupported platform...

Well, of course you have a point, and if maintaining two builds of your 
app is the way to support older platforms, then that's a sensible decision.
-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[<lm...@bi...>]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 12:16:31AM +0200, Daniel A. Steffen wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 00:08, Larry McVoy <lm...@bi...> wrote:
> > So we've got a lot of internal development on top of 8.6 already.
> > It's not really an option to move back to 8.5, then we chew off
> > solving all the problems that are only solved in 8.6.
> >
> > It's more likely that this would be the last straw for us and
> > we'd have to start migrating off of tcl.  I'm really not sure
> > but I know I'm going to be raked over the coals by my team and
> > customers when they find out about this.  From my point of view,
> > dropping support for a perfectly viable platform throws into
> > question the viability of the tk system as a toolkit.  It's a
> > big deal and if the core goes along with this I dunno what we'll
> > do, but it won't be much fun.
> >
> > I wonder what the technical issues are in supporting 10.4?
> 
> they may not be that large, I haven't looked into it frankly. Feel
> free to have someone at bitmover look into it, I can't justify
> spending time on it.

I can understand that, everyone is busy.  Unfortunately, I'm basically
the only person at BitMover that is in favor of using the tcl/tk system.
I've fought for years to stay on it for the cross platform cost savings
but it's not been easy.  We have daily arguments about whether something
else would be a better choice.

The reality is that if I were not the guy in charge we would have long
since moved off.  If I show up and tell the team that the tcl core team
has decided to drop support for a current major platform and our only
answer is to do the work ourselves, they'll crucify me.  I'll be faced
with a screaming pile of I-told-you-so's.

Not your problem, I'm just giving a glimpse into the hell that is my
management life.  For me, this decision has a real chance of killing
our use of tcl, killing the L project, and setting us back a couple
of years.  Lovely position to find oneself in but it is what it is.

> FWIW I'm also quite happy to continue with the status quo, i.e.
> maintain the cocoa port in the gihub fork and let the tk/macosx code
> in CVS bitrot away, I won't be doing any more work on it, I haven't
> touched it since last August as is (nor has anybody else).

Just for the record, I'm very grateful for your work, I should have 
started with that statement.  Showing up and raining on your parade
is the last thing I wanted to do.  And to put some teeth in that, if
you wanted to offer up a price tag for maintaining 10.4 support,
figure that out.  If it's something we can afford I'm happy to cough
up the money.

Regardless, this is great stuff, and I support it, I just wish it 
included 10.4.  Sorry to be such a downer.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[<lm...@bi...>]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 06:21:10PM -0400, Youness Alaoui wrote:
> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 06:12:25PM -0400, Kevin Walzer wrote:
> > Larry McVoy wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > What I'm not happy about is dropping 10.4 support.  10.4 is still an
> > > actively supported release, it was a good release, and as a vendor it
> > > is not my place to tell people to get off a platform before the platform
> > > is end of lifed.
> > 
> > Apple's general practice is to support the current and immediately 
> > preceding OS. Last week I downloaded my 10.5.7 update, and I also 
> > downloaded a bunch of security updates for my installation of 10.4 OS X 
> > Server. Once 10.6 is released, 10.4 will no longer receive security 
> > updates if Apple follows its traditional practice and it will be an 
> > unsupported OS.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Kevin Walzer
> > Code by Kevin
> > http://www.codebykevin.com
> > 
> 
> But does Apple dropping support for a platform mean that
> everyone else should drop support for it ? Microsoft dropped
> support for windows 95 so long ago, but people are still
> using it, and we, as software developers should still give
> support to those people who want to keep using an
> unsupported platform...

Indeed.  I know people like to use the latest and greatest but I have to
deal with enterprise customers who tend to skip a release or 2 when they
get on one that works.  10.4 works.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Youness A. <kak...@ka...>]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 06:12:25PM -0400, Kevin Walzer wrote:
> Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> > 
> > What I'm not happy about is dropping 10.4 support.  10.4 is still an
> > actively supported release, it was a good release, and as a vendor it
> > is not my place to tell people to get off a platform before the platform
> > is end of lifed.
> 
> Apple's general practice is to support the current and immediately 
> preceding OS. Last week I downloaded my 10.5.7 update, and I also 
> downloaded a bunch of security updates for my installation of 10.4 OS X 
> Server. Once 10.6 is released, 10.4 will no longer receive security 
> updates if Apple follows its traditional practice and it will be an 
> unsupported OS.
> 
> -- 
> Kevin Walzer
> Code by Kevin
> http://www.codebykevin.com
> 

But does Apple dropping support for a platform mean that
everyone else should drop support for it ? Microsoft dropped
support for windows 95 so long ago, but people are still
using it, and we, as software developers should still give
support to those people who want to keep using an
unsupported platform...

That's my 2c,

KaKaRoTo

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Daniel A. S. <da...@us...>]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 00:08, Larry McVoy <lm...@bi...> wrote:
> So we've got a lot of internal development on top of 8.6 already.
> It's not really an option to move back to 8.5, then we chew off
> solving all the problems that are only solved in 8.6.
>
> It's more likely that this would be the last straw for us and
> we'd have to start migrating off of tcl.  I'm really not sure
> but I know I'm going to be raked over the coals by my team and
> customers when they find out about this.  From my point of view,
> dropping support for a perfectly viable platform throws into
> question the viability of the tk system as a toolkit.  It's a
> big deal and if the core goes along with this I dunno what we'll
> do, but it won't be much fun.
>
> I wonder what the technical issues are in supporting 10.4?

they may not be that large, I haven't looked into it frankly. Feel
free to have someone at bitmover look into it, I can't justify
spending time on it.

FWIW I'm also quite happy to continue with the status quo, i.e.
maintain the cocoa port in the gihub fork and let the tk/macosx code
in CVS bitrot away, I won't be doing any more work on it, I haven't
touched it since last August as is (nor has anybody else).

Cheers,

Daniel

--
** Daniel A. Steffen                   **
** <mailto:da...@us...>  **

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

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

Larry McVoy wrote:

> 
> What I'm not happy about is dropping 10.4 support.  10.4 is still an
> actively supported release, it was a good release, and as a vendor it
> is not my place to tell people to get off a platform before the platform
> is end of lifed.

Apple's general practice is to support the current and immediately 
preceding OS. Last week I downloaded my 10.5.7 update, and I also 
downloaded a bunch of security updates for my installation of 10.4 OS X 
Server. Once 10.6 is released, 10.4 will no longer receive security 
updates if Apple follows its traditional practice and it will be an 
unsupported OS.

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[<lm...@bi...>]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 05:52:55PM -0400, Youness Alaoui wrote:
> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 05:38:39PM -0400, Kevin Walzer wrote:
> > Larry McVoy wrote:
> > 
> > > Perhaps we're the only commercial vendor left using tk that is always
> > > interested in 8.6.  I would have thought there are others but maybe
> > > not.  Anyway, if it is a flag day let me register my strong vote 
> > > against that idea.
> > 
> > I'm a much smaller commercial vendor than Bitmover that also uses Tk 
> > (exclusively) on Mac OS, and I strongly endorse the move to support only 
> > Cocoa in 8.6. 8.5 will continue to be available if you need pre-10.5 
> > support. I am curious how many of your customers use older versions of 
> > Mac OS? The tendency among Mac users is to migrate very quickly to the 
> > latest OS release, and with 10.6 due out later this year--even in the 
> > next couple of months--10.5 will soon become a legacy platform.
> > 
> > More importantly, the Carbon foundation that currently underlies Tk Aqua 
> > is nearing obsolescence. It doesn't support 64-bit, Apple is not doing 
> > any more development of it, and so on. The move to Cocoa ensures Tk's 
> > viability as a native toolkit on OS X for years to come. In my view that 
> > fact alone makes this a necessary move for Tk Aqua.
> > 
> I agree that the move to Cocoa is important for the Tk
> community, and I would definitely vote for integrating those
> patches.. all I'm wondering is if it's possible to have
> Carbon AND Cocoa support in the core.. if not, then Larry, I
> guess you'd have to release two bundles, one with TK 8.5 and
> one with Tk 8.6 for greater compatibility..

So we've got a lot of internal development on top of 8.6 already.
It's not really an option to move back to 8.5, then we chew off
solving all the problems that are only solved in 8.6.

It's more likely that this would be the last straw for us and 
we'd have to start migrating off of tcl.  I'm really not sure 
but I know I'm going to be raked over the coals by my team and
customers when they find out about this.  From my point of view,
dropping support for a perfectly viable platform throws into
question the viability of the tk system as a toolkit.  It's a
big deal and if the core goes along with this I dunno what we'll
do, but it won't be much fun.

I wonder what the technical issues are in supporting 10.4?
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[<lm...@bi...>]

The issue for us is not that carbon is going away, it's that 10.4 support
is going away.  I'm perfectly happy to go through the growing pains of
moving over to the Cocoa based aqua toolkit.

What I'm not happy about is dropping 10.4 support.  10.4 is still an
actively supported release, it was a good release, and as a vendor it
is not my place to tell people to get off a platform before the platform
is end of lifed.

One of tcl/tk's claims to fame is backwards compat and platform support.
Dropping 10.4 seems to run counter to the goals of the system.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Daniel A. S. <da...@us...>]

Hi Larry,

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 22:40, Larry McVoy <lm...@bi...> wrote:
>> The principal new constraint of the TkAqua Cocoa port is that it
>> requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later (TkAqua currently requires Mac OS X
>> 10.3).
>
> Does this mean that if we upgrade to 8.6 we drop support for anything
> earlier than 10.5 for _all_ tk apps?

yes, for TkAqua anyway, you could always fallback to TkX11 of course

> Or is it only an issue if you want to use the new stuff?  I.e., is it
> a flag day or a choice?

a flag day, IMO it is not feasible to interleave the two codebases
into the same sourcefiles via #ifdefs, it would make things even less
maintainable than the current Carbon code (difficult enough to
maintain as is)

the only reasonable other option would be to have a separate source
directory in tk for the new cocoa port (or better move the contents of
the current 'macosx' directory to tk/macosx-legacy or somesuch) and
add a configure flag that lets you switch back to carbon.

The main drawback with that idea (other than making a mess in
unix/Makefile.in) are lack of maintainer resources.
Quite honestly, I have zero interest in continuing to maintain the
Carbon code now that the Cocoa port is done, and me being the only
active Mac OS X Tk maintainer, the legacy codebase is certain to
bitrot fairly quickly on the ever-changing HEAD.

As evidence of this, see the rapid bitrot of the mac classic codebase
(which still ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4), even though this was on a less
frequently changing maintenance branch it became unbuildable pretty
much immediately after I removed mac classic support from the mainline
and stopped maintenance on the 8.4 codebase, and now is only so much
dead weight that has been shipping with the last 10 or so 8.4
releases, all because we wanted to be prudent and not withdraw support
for the platform on the stable branch at the time (in effect the users
lost support very quickly anyway because nobody was maintaining the
code anymore...).

> If it is a flag day, that raises serious problems for us, we'll probably
> have to stay one whatever is the pre-merge.  10.5 is the current release
> and it's awfully hard to tell customers they have to upgrade their os
> that is only a couple of years old (we support other platforms with
> releases as old as 1996, or 13 years).

I'm guessing that none of those have the update frequency and API
churn of Mac OS X however, the Carbon API that TkAqua is using
currently is EOL and in life support mode.

FWIW Omni has some stats on 10.5 adoption at large, over 55% of their
users are running 10.5 currently, and once 10.6 is out (which will
almost certainly be before Tk 8.6 goes final), the percentage of users
still running 10.4 or earlier is certain to decrease even more rapidly
    http://update.omnigroup.com/

> Perhaps we're the only commercial vendor left using tk that is always
> interested in 8.6.  I would have thought there are others but maybe
> not.  Anyway, if it is a flag day let me register my strong vote
> against that idea.

Larry, you being a commercial vendor and all, if this is a big issue
for you, I would suggest you put up and provide maintainer resources
for the Carbon port!

If one of your engineers takes over maintaining the Carbon codebase, I
will put in the time to modify the buildsystem for a parallel carbon
and cocoa source dirs (which will still take several weeks to get done
however, swamped with work that actually pays the bills ATM) and I
will happily be the maintainer for TkAqua Cocoa only from then on and
let you guys deal with Carbon...

I won't put in that time however just to be left holding the bag with
an unmaintained bitrotting legacy codebase that we'll be dragging
around for several more years without it doing any good to anybody...

Cheers,

Daniel

--
** Daniel A. Steffen                   **
** <mailto:da...@us...>  **

Re: [TCLCORE] ttk::style configure TMenu -background has no effect

[Pat T. <pat...@us...>]

Youness Alaoui <kak...@ka...> writes:

>On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 07:56:38AM +0100, Donal K. Fellows wrote:
>> Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote:
>> > I am wondering why following has no effect on the theme (this is with
>> > 8.5):
>> > 
>> > ttk::style configure TMenu -background "#aa0000"
>> > #the above doesn't work on Ubuntu Jaunty with 8.5
>> > ttk::style configure TButton -background "#aa0000"
>> > #the button one does
>> 
>> Menus aren't styled. On Windows and OSX, they're fully native widgets,
>> and on X11 they're old-style classic widgets, neither of which respond
>> to style changes.
>> 
>> Donal.
>> 
>Hi,
>
>I think that menus should definitely be styled at some point
>(as well as 'toplevel').. the reason is simple, if you use a
>style that is for example 'orange', then you'd get grey
>menus that won't fit with the rest of the widgets.. same
>thing for unused space in a toplevel...
>I remember doing some hacks on chameleon to fix this where I
>would try to guess the native color of the style's widgets
>and add an option to Tk's db to change the default
>background color, then loop through all windows/frames/menus
>and change their color so that when you switch from one
>style to another, it would look ok instead of having two
>color schemes all over your windows...
>

Yes - menus should be subject to themeing. However this was
originally done as an extension and menus are highly integrated into
tk's internals. Since tile got integrated into Tk no-one with the
requisite panache and bravado has stepped in to attempt the task.

-- 
Pat Thoyts                            http://www.patthoyts.tk/
PGP fingerprint 2C 6E 98 07 2C 59 C8 97  10 CE 11 E6 04 E0 B9 DD

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Youness A. <kak...@ka...>]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 05:38:39PM -0400, Kevin Walzer wrote:
> Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps we're the only commercial vendor left using tk that is always
> > interested in 8.6.  I would have thought there are others but maybe
> > not.  Anyway, if it is a flag day let me register my strong vote 
> > against that idea.
> 
> I'm a much smaller commercial vendor than Bitmover that also uses Tk 
> (exclusively) on Mac OS, and I strongly endorse the move to support only 
> Cocoa in 8.6. 8.5 will continue to be available if you need pre-10.5 
> support. I am curious how many of your customers use older versions of 
> Mac OS? The tendency among Mac users is to migrate very quickly to the 
> latest OS release, and with 10.6 due out later this year--even in the 
> next couple of months--10.5 will soon become a legacy platform.
> 
> More importantly, the Carbon foundation that currently underlies Tk Aqua 
> is nearing obsolescence. It doesn't support 64-bit, Apple is not doing 
> any more development of it, and so on. The move to Cocoa ensures Tk's 
> viability as a native toolkit on OS X for years to come. In my view that 
> fact alone makes this a necessary move for Tk Aqua.
> 
I agree that the move to Cocoa is important for the Tk
community, and I would definitely vote for integrating those
patches.. all I'm wondering is if it's possible to have
Carbon AND Cocoa support in the core.. if not, then Larry, I
guess you'd have to release two bundles, one with TK 8.5 and
one with Tk 8.6 for greater compatibility..

KaKaRoTo

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Youness A. <kak...@ka...>]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 05:32:32PM -0400, Kevin Walzer wrote:
> Youness Alaoui wrote:
>
>>>
>> That's a big issue for us.. Isn't it possible to have Tk use
>> Carbon on < 10.5 and use Cocoa on > 10.5.. I'm sure it adds
>> more work and maintainance, but it would allow a broader
>> audience to use Tk apps... forcing the use of 10.5 for Tk is
>> not such a great idea...i
>
> In general, Mac OS users are much more likely to have the current OS  
> installed than users on other platforms, such as Windows. With 10.6  
> nearing release, 10.5 is going to become a legacy platform very quickly.
>
Maybe but I'm not really convinced.. it's like people who
say noone uses win95 anymore, but actually, we have quite a
lot of people still using it.. maybe not in the
US/Canada/Europe, but I'm sure that many people in 3rd world
countries have very low end computers (because it costs a
lot and the salaries there aren't as high as here), and they
can't afford to have anything newer than win95...
In the same logic, I'm sure many people are still keeping
old legacy platforms.. we have a bunch of users complaining
about aMSN crashing on Panther (10.3)... Considering that
mac os X v10.2 last version was released in october 2003, I
think that it's not "that old"...
We are proud to say that we are here to support everyone and
help everyone get aMSN working on their systems, so having
as much compatibility is ncessary unfortunately even for
legacy platforms...

>> However, app developers could ship their products with 8.5 bundled
>> for < 10.5 and 8.6 bundled for >= 10.5 (like we currently ship aMSN
>> with tk 8.4 for windows 95 users and tk 8.5 for winXP+ users)
>>
> This is certainly a practical solution, but I wonder how necessary it  
> will be.

It just might be necessary.. for win95, when we released
aMSN 0.97 with tcl/tk 8.5 bundled, we got quite a lot of
frustrated users complaining about it not working on
win95... so we just had to release a version with 8.4
bundled... I'm afraid we just might get the same issue with
mac users and 8.6..


>
> -- 
> Kevin Walzer
> Code by Kevin
> http://www.codebykevin.com

Re: [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

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

Larry McVoy wrote:

> Perhaps we're the only commercial vendor left using tk that is always
> interested in 8.6.  I would have thought there are others but maybe
> not.  Anyway, if it is a flag day let me register my strong vote 
> against that idea.

I'm a much smaller commercial vendor than Bitmover that also uses Tk 
(exclusively) on Mac OS, and I strongly endorse the move to support only 
Cocoa in 8.6. 8.5 will continue to be available if you need pre-10.5 
support. I am curious how many of your customers use older versions of 
Mac OS? The tendency among Mac users is to migrate very quickly to the 
latest OS release, and with 10.6 due out later this year--even in the 
next couple of months--10.5 will soon become a legacy platform.

More importantly, the Carbon foundation that currently underlies Tk Aqua 
is nearing obsolescence. It doesn't support 64-bit, Apple is not doing 
any more development of it, and so on. The move to Cocoa ensures Tk's 
viability as a native toolkit on OS X for years to come. In my view that 
fact alone makes this a necessary move for Tk Aqua.

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com