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Cygwin Tcl/Tk on Trial
- From: Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>
- To: xconq7 at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2004 02:31:48 -0600
- Subject: Cygwin Tcl/Tk on Trial
After examining the facts of the case, I am hereby judging the Cygwin
Tcl/Tk implementation to be unsuitable for use with Xconq.
It is found wanting because it does not provide an usable set of
substitute functions for X11. Although some X11 functions can be faked
with dummy implementations, such as is already done with 'XSetTile',
'XFlush', and 'XSynchronize', there are others which cannot be faked so
easily, such as 'XPutPixel' (from 'X11/Xutil.h'). The Cygwin Tcl/Tk
implementation neither implements these functions (AFAICT), nor provides
headers for them. And, of course, it is unacceptable to mix Windows
Tcl/Tk and X11; the resulting Frankenstein does actually start (I tried
it on a whim), but crashes the moment it calls one of the functions from
the Cygwin X11 library.
By contrast, both the MinGW32 Tcl/Tk implementation and ActiveTcl
provide their own X11 headers (and thus implementations as well), and
both are completely usable by Xconq.
If the Tcl/Tk interface was to become independent of any direct accesses
to X11 functions, we could then utilize the Cygwin Tcl/Tk as well.
However, since that is not the reality, I am not going to make any
further efforts to help Xconq build with Cygwin Tcl/Tk. I think it is
sufficient that we already have two native Windows Tcl/Tk
implementations that Tkconq can be built with.
Eric