[GRASS5] Re: installing GRASS without fink

[Glynn Clements]

William K wrote:

> So, how are you getting Tcl/Tk Aqua to work with GRASS?  According to 
> the GRASS developers, my experience, and the experiences of others, 
> GRASS NEEDS an X-Windows build of Tcl/Tk.  Unless you use OpenOSX's 
> GRASS (which is at 5.0.2 right now).

Just to clarify this:

The stock tcltkgrass (in both 5.0.x and 5.3) requires X11 Tcl/Tk,
although the dependency is essentially gratuitous; it wouldn't be a
great deal of work to fix this. OpenOSX produced some patches to allow
it to work with Aqua Tcl/Tk. Those patches are available from the
GRASS web site (in the MacOSX binaries directory), but haven't been
integrated.

NVIZ absolutely requires X11 Tcl/Tk and X11 OpenGL, and changing this
would be far from trivial.

> Tcl/Tk for X11 is no big trouble to build.
> 
> If there are patches you're applying to GRASS to use Tcl/Tk Aqua, I'm 
> sure there are many who would like to know,

See:
	http://grass.itc.it/grass5/binary/mac_os_x/

Specifically:

	http://grass.itc.it/grass5/binary/mac_os_x/OpenOSX-Additions-Grass-5.0.2.tar.bz2

> and maybe they can be incorporated in the GRASS source.

That would be nice, but no-one has done it yet. Realistically, this
would need to be done by someone who has direct access to a Mac (i.e. 
not just remote login), preferably someone with some knowledge of
Tcl/Tk. And it needs to be done so as not to break tcltkgrass on other
platforms.

AFAICT, the main portability problems are:

1. The assumption that the HTML browser is Netscape.

2. Use of X11 "xwininfo" program instead of Tcl "winfo geometry" or
"wm geometry" commands (for tcltkgrass windows) or "d.frame" (for
monitors).

3. Use of Unix "ls" program instead of Tcl "glob" command.

4. The "console1" issue (this looks like a bug in the Aqua Tcl/Tk to
me, and the "fix" isn't really a fix).

The other changes in the OpenOSX patches appear to be "improvements"
rather than actual bug fixes. OTOH, one thing which could be
considered a portability bug but isn't fixed by the OpenOSX patches is
the hard-coded use of "xterm"; it should be possible to use other
terminal programs.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>