[GRASS-dev] more NVIZ updates

[Michael Barton]

Thanks Hamish,


> From: Hamish <hamish_nospam at yahoo.com>
> Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2006 20:28:06 +1300
> To: Michael Barton <michael.barton at asu.edu>
> Cc: <grass-dev at grass.itc.it>
> Subject: Re: [GRASS-dev] more NVIZ updates
> 
> Michael Barton wrote:
>> 
>> 1. I forgot to change the Makefile to reference the new files I did.
>> This may be the problem. Need to add configindex, panel_rquery.tcl and
>> panel_vquery.tcl. I also got rid of several files: panel_query.tcl,
>> panel_query_orig.tcl, panel_query_pgs.tcl, panel_pick.tcl, and
>> panel_hightlight.tcl.
> 
> *.tcl are already copied, diff for configIndex is attached.

I don't understand the Makefiles as well as I might, but it sort of looks
like it will pick up configIndex without any change.

> 
> Installing configIndex doesn't help.
> 
> 
>> 2. Have you tested this with 8.4?
> 
> not yet, will do.
> 
> 
>> There was a lot of effort to bring NVIZ up to 8.4 recently.
> 
> I am not sure what a programming target of "bring up to 8.4" means.
> "Modernizing" NVIZ does not have to make it backwards-incompatible with
> tcl/tk 8.3.
> 

I seem to remember that NVIZ would not work with 8.4, only 8.3--at least on
some systems. There were changes made last summer (not by me) to remedy
this. I've tried hard to *not* do anything to break 8.3 compatibility, like
using bwidgets 1.2.1 for any new widgets.

However, much of the NVIZ code is very old and uses custom widgets that are
sometimes buggy. These problems are difficult to track down because it also
uses hard-coded references to particular widgets throughout, rather than the
variables that they are supposed to change. This makes it an incredibly
complex maze to sort out. A proper rewrite would make NVIZ much easier to
modify in the future and probably reduce the code by half. It will also take
a lot of time. This could be done in a wxPython port.

> 
>> Is this not working with your system?
> 
> I am purposefully staying with 8.3 to catch any incompatibilities.
> 
Thanks. The errors you list don't look like 8.3 incompatibilities on the
surface of it. But if it *does* work with 8.4 and not with 8.3, then we'll
know where to start.

Michael

__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University

phone: 480-965-6213
fax: 480-965-7671
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton