[GRASS5] Platform for next generation UI

[Francesco Paolo Lovergine]

On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 11:16:49PM -0700, Michael Barton wrote:
> This has led to incompatibilities and conflicts (e.g., with 8.4 in some Linux distros and
> with the Cygwin version), issues with OpenGL in NVIZ, and dueling versions
> in some cases (e.g., if you install Lorenzo's binaries for Mac OS X, you end
> up with 3 different versions: the one that comes with OS X, the x11 one, and
> TclTk Aqua). If a new UI for GRASS is based on TclTk, it could not simply be
> a dependency IMHO; we would need to distribute it with GRASS in order to
> make sure that all GRASS users have proper functionality--and we would need
> to install it so as to avoid incompatibilities with versions that come with
> OS's (e.g., as Lorenzo does by putting it into a grasslib directory). See
> <http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActiveTcl/> and
> <http://tcltkaqua.sourceforge.net/> for more information
> 

Embedding external software within other programs is generally discouraged in
any sane GNU/Linux distribution. It requiresi maintainers also supporting for
security the embedded sofware and could create conflicts with mainstream
tools if the whole thing is not properly managed. In Debian we are
currently supporting more flavors of Tcl/Tk just to avoid breakages
in application softwares due to version incompatibilties. I see no reasons to 
change this. The only software I know of that embedded in the past Tcl
is AOLserver, but the team had a very good reason for that: the need
of multithreading support which was absent/broken in old versions. It
was indeed a fork, plain and clear. 

I would try to fix NVIZ threading issues instead, which still require
us to use the non-thread enabled Tcl 8.3

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine