Tcl - Cross-platform deploying (Was: Tcl/Tk - Observations from a newbie.)

Author

Cross-platform deploying (Was: Tcl/Tk - Observations from a newbie.)

Victor Wagner

2004-08-23, 3:58 am

David N. Welton <davidw@dedasys.com> wrote:

> I can't stand windows, and avoid it like the plague.

> But you know what's really

? Tcl/Tk let me write an app on my
> Linux box, do some minimal testing and tweaking on a windows machine,
> and then hand it off to a client! It was so

to see it 'just
> work'.

This is very thing I've mentioned in the my post.

I know that I'm not only in this camp and would be very glad to exchange
some experiencies.

But there are few problems I've encounter, which makes amount of testing
on target platform not-so-minimal.

I ought to grep my sources for switch {$::tcl_platform(platform)} to
make exact list of this glitches, but from memory:

1. Problem with character sets. Of course, it is much less annoying for
people who use us-ascii which is subset of all windows and unix
character sets.

2. Quite different directory layout. Most interesting problem is that
Windows DO have statdard directories for such things as program code,
configuration files and data files, and kindly places their names into
environment. But some users for whatever reason expect program to broke
this layout and put all the data files into its program directory. May
be because so many 3rd-party programs do so.

3. Registry. Well-behaved Windows program have to deal with registry.

4. Inter process communication. What do you use instead of send to debug
on Windows?

5. System color scheme. Yes, Tk provides way to use system colors. But
again it is platform specific. And Tk requires application to be
restarted after system color scheme was changed.

--
Just don't make the '9' format pack/unpack numbers... :-)
-- Larry Wall in <199710091434.HAA00838@wall.org>

Jeff Hobbs

2004-08-25, 3:58 pm

Victor Wagner wrote:

> 2. Quite different directory layout. Most interesting problem is that
> Windows DO have statdard directories for such things as program code,
> configuration files and data files, and kindly places their names into
> environment. But some users for whatever reason expect program to broke
> this layout and put all the data files into its program directory. May
> be because so many 3rd-party programs do so.

With the LSB becoming more common, it actually has some notion
of where files should be placed. Of course, while the distros
are adhereing to this standard at varying levels, not many
general apps do that I know of.

> 4. Inter process communication. What do you use instead of send to debug
> on Windows?

IPC isn't the only way to debug. One nice thing about Tcl is
that the level of abstraction for IPC is so good that the exact
same code will work across platforms and provide a high level of
functionality. As for debugging, I think send got reintroduced
into Tk for 8.5 by Pat Thoyts (COM based), but one of my
favorite tricks is embedding tkcon into my apps (or starting
them from tkcon). I often add a switch as well that sets up a
comm port that I can connect to with TDK Inspector, which is
handy for general UI debugging.

> 5. System color scheme. Yes, Tk provides way to use system colors. But
> again it is platform specific. And Tk requires application to be
> restarted after system color scheme was changed.

Yes, I consider that a bug, but it really can't be resolved
until we have named colors in 8.5, because while the underlying
color for "SystemWindow" may change, there is currently no way
to propagate this event to all windows that may be using that
color.

--
Jeff Hobbs, The Tcl Guy
http://www.ActiveState.com/, a division of Sophos

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