Scott,

On Monday, Mar 24, 2003, at 14:00 Australia/Sydney, Scott Schwartz 
wrote:

>  Sorry if this is a FAQ, but have you considered building a version
>  that could do both X11 and Aqua (e.g. see if DISPLAY is set, otherwise
>  fall back to native)?  Having two separate installations has obvious
>  disadvantages, since all the *.tcl stuff could be shared.

I have certainly considered it... but there are a number non-trivial 
challenges involved.

The ideal would be to have TkX11 bundled as a framework, this would not 
be too hard to do by wrapping the usual tk unix makeprocess in 
projectbuilder similarly to what we do now in tcl.

This might then be be called TkX11.framework, or more cleanly it could 
be a separate subversion of the current Tk.framework (e.g. 
Versions/8.4X11); but note that there is currently a bug with versioned 
frameworks c.f. recent discussion on tcl-mac.
However, in the latter case, Tk.framework/Version/Current would still 
need to refer to TkAqua however, which would make linking against TkX11 
awkward...

/usr/bin/wish would then be a script checking for the presence of 
DISPLAY or a -display argument and launching either e.g. 
/usr/bin/wishX11 or /Applications/Utilities/Wish Shell.app

A big question is what to do with Tk extensions, many of them use X11 
directly if available, or have TkAqua specific ports, so potentially 
two versions of some extensions would be needed, and some way to decide 
which to load depending on whether TkAqua or TkX11 is running. This 
would probably require separate /Library/Tk and /Library/TkX11 
directories in addition to /Library/Tcl to work with the existing tcl 
package mechanism, which is a highly non-trivial change AFAICT.

In summary, quite a lot of work with not a very large benefit to my 
eyes. For one, we want to encourage people to use the Aqua port; and if 
you need X11, the nicest option is probably to use tclkit anyway, where 
many of these issues are sidestepped by having a self contained 
executable with e.g. X11 specific extensions also contained in a .kit.

You're certainly welcome to have a go at this however if you think it 
worthwhile, I'll be glad to give you pointers...

Cheers,

Daniel

--
** Daniel A. Steffen     **  "And now for something completely
** Dept. of Mathematics  **   different"    Monty Python
** Macquarie University  **  <mailto:steffen@[...].au> 
** NSW 2109 Australia    **  <http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~steffen/> 



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