Tcl Plugin? (Re: The Weekly Pheromone VII I9)

[glen e. p. ropella]

Ken Cline writes:
 > Just out of curiosity... Did y'all try out the Tcl Plugin
 > that, according to the Sunscript site, allows "running  
 > safe-Tcl/Tk applications inside of Web browsers" ?

No, we didn't.  I saw that awhile back but put off learning
about it until such a time as it might be needed.  And
I don't think we're going to need it.

 > I would expect that the JavaGUI route is still probably a
 > better choice for some of the reasons you stated above.
 > However, I just wanted to know whether you had evaluated
 > the Tcl Plugin and what y'all had thought of it?

Well, these are really two separate issues.  The new
Tcl/Tk plugin might take us a baby step closer to remote
execution; but, it won't get us away from the real monkey
riding us, which is the several libraries we depend on 
to work (X, libtclobjc, Tcl/Tk, BLT).  The main idea for
doing this "port" (or, as Chris calls it, 'de-unixing')
is to move away from Unix style legacy tools like Tcl/Tk
and into more platform independence.  Plus, most of the 
installation problems are due to these packages.  Of 
course, we're jumping out of the frying pan and into the
fire by moving to a Java GUI.  But, at least there's a 
wider audience for Java than for the other libraries.

 > Now, while we're on the subject... Is there an official SFI
 > position on which version of Tcl/Tk to use?
 > 
 > I see that the "needed-software" ftp site provides 7.4/4.0
 > and 7.5/4.1.  However, from the mailing list I know there
 > are some using 7.6/4.2.
 > 
 > The reason I ask is that I started rebuilding our swarm
 > environment and chose 7.5/4.1 - I was thinking that 7.5/4.1 
 > was latest version that Swarm was guaranteed to be 99%
 > compatible with.  (I'm trying to pick the path of least
 > resistance, of course.)

That's correct.  In order for 7.6/4.2 to work, you need to
patch BLT.  But, if you do patch BLT, then 7.6/4.2 works
just fine.

 > Everything was going rather smoothly until I got around to
 > running the configure script for libtclobjc... I'm a little
 > puzzled by the following configure error:
 > 
 >    Tcl_AppInit failed: version mismatch: library scripts
 >    expect Tcl version 7.5b1 or later but the loaded version
 >    is only 105
 > 
 > There is only one version of tcl7.5 available at the
 > Sunscript site and I suspect that it includes beta1
 > revisions.  (Something strange happened to the copy of
 > tcl7.5 we downloaded from the SFI site, for some reason the
 > configure script was screwed up.  I have no idea what
 > happened but downloading another copy of tcl solved the
 > problem immediately.)

Wow!  I'm not even going to try to guess at that one. [grin]

 > Well anyway, unless I hear otherwise, I was going to upgrade
 > to 7.6/4.2.  Any thoughts?  Comments?  Warnings?

Go ahead.  Here's the necessary patch for blt:
----------------------------cut here---------------------------------
--- /net/user/gepr/Swarm/support-libs/blt2.1/src/bltBgexec.c    Sat Apr 20 
22:28:26 1996
+++ bltBgexec.c Tue Feb 11 14:45:57 1997
@@ -1175,7 +1175,7 @@
     if (bgPtr->errVar != NULL) {
        errFilePtr = &(bgPtr->errorId); /* Error variable designated */
     }
-    numPids = Tcl_CreatePipeline(interp, argc - i, argv + i, &(bgPtr->pidArr),
+    numPids = TclCreateCommandChannel(interp, argc - i, argv + i, 
&(bgPtr->pidArr),
        (int *)NULL, &(bgPtr->outputId), errFilePtr);
 
     if (numPids < 0) {
-----------------------------cut here-----------------------------------

glen
-- 
{glen e. p. ropella <address@hidden> |  Send lawyers, guns, and money!  }
{Hive Drone, SFI Swarm Project         |            Hail Eris!            }
{http://www.trail.com/~gepr/home.html  |               =><=               }

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