[GRASS-dev] debugging nviz with TclTk 8.5 aqua

[William Kyngesburye]

On Jul 24, 2008, at 3:00 PM, Glynn Clements wrote:

>> The main focus of this is the bundling step in the OSX app makefile.
>> To make sure that the configured tcltk is available to nviz, and to
>> avoid confusion with the system tcltk at runtime (which is where
>> Michael was having problems), I bundle tcltk into the app package.  I
>> thus need to know the version for copying tclsh, wish, the library  
>> and
>> tcl library folder, all of which have the version in the name, and by
>> default tcltk doesn't install unversioned symlinks.
>
> Ugh; I really think Tcl/Tk should be a separate package.
>
> If there are Tcl/Tk packages available from third parties, I think
> that you should just point people to one of them. If there aren't,
> then provide one, and we can put it on the GRASS site (we already
> provide a Tcl/Tk package for Cygwin, as Cygwin's version is broken).


Well, another part of the need to know the version, is user  
convenience and the way the OSX app works.

The application doesn't have access to the user shell initialization,  
so it won't see any of their .bash_profile (or other) settings.   
(There is a way to set env vars for aplications, but most users don't  
know about that, and I would like startup to be as simple as possible.)

I know there is .grass.bashrc, but setting GRASS_WISH there doesn't  
work for the first GUI screen because grass.bashrc is read after that  
starts.

For the tcltk install, Apple includes symlinks for tclsh and wish, but  
the default source build only has tclsh8.x and wish8.x, so I at least  
need the version to set GRASS_WISH in the OSX app startup.


I found another tcltk install layout issue that is causing me trouble  
- with a source framework build no library symlinks are installed  
(Apple adds convenient /usr/lib symlinks to the frameworks), so  
current library detection in configure is meaningless, though required  
for the tests to succeed (configure needs an option for tcltk aqua  
detection).

The problem, even if a tcltk aqua option is added, is that wish and  
tclsh are still installed in /usr/local/bin, not in the frameworks,  
and I have no way of knowing they are there since there is nothing  
stored in the framework telling me so.

Two possibilities:

- add a --with-tcltk-bin option

- /usr/local/bin/wish is an odd one - wish does exist in the  
framework, but /usr/local/bin/wish is a shell script that executes the  
framework wish, not a symlink. This could be executed directly by  
GRASS, and thus automatically configured.

And, I don't see tclsh used in any of the GRASS code.  Is tclsh a  
shell for executing tcl (non-gui) scripts?  Does anyone use it?  Can  
we ignore it?  (and users can configure it themselves in grass.bashrc  
if they ever need it.)


So, after all that, I see two aditions needed for configure:

- set the tcltk version in platform.make

- add a tcltk aqua option, much like what we do for opengl.  And it  
would have to be dependent on opengl=aqua.

It would have to detect the active framework by looking in /Library/ 
Frameworks first, then /System/Library/Frameworks.  Or possibly accept  
a user path (reuse --with-tcltk-libs, or have a separate --with-tcltk- 
framework), which would set TCLTKLIBPATH = -F/user/path.

The framework path (detected or user), would be used to set the  
include paths:

-I$path/Tcl.framework/Headers -I$path/Tk.framework/Headers -I$path/ 
Tk.framework/PrivateHeaders

And verify that the needed tkMacOSXInt.h is in one of those.

TCLTKLIBS will always be:

TCLTKLIBS = -framework Tcl -framework Tk


-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

"Time is an illusion - lunchtime doubly so."

- Ford Prefect