[Pythonmac-SIG] Tk 8.5 and leopard.

[Kevin Walzer]

Nicholas Cole wrote:
> I've just seen that a new version of Tk has been released, and the
> screenshots suggest that it will blend in much better on the mac platoform.
> What is going to be the best way of installing the new Tk and a version of
> python that can use it, without upsetting apple's python install (which I'm
> using with Xcode...)
> 

Here's what I did:

1. Remove my installations of Tcl/Tk 8.4.x from /Library/Frameworks.
2. Build Tcl/Tk 8.5 from source and install in /Library/Frameworks.
3. Download the source code for Python 2.5.1. In "setup.py," comment out 
/System/Library as a place to search for Tcl/Tk--this will force Python 
to link to the installation of Tcl/Tk 8.5 in /Library/Frameworks.
4. Build and install. Python should work with Tk 8.5.

I should point out that the nicer screenshots for Tk are a new widget 
set, Tile/Themed Tk, which are part of the Tk core. However, they have 
to be explicitly called, and there is currenly no official support for 
them in Python's Tkinter module. I maintain a wrapper at 
http://tkinter.unpythonic.net/wiki/TileWrapper that lets you load the 
themed widgets, but I am not the original author and as I cannot reach 
the original author, it's unlikely this module will be included in Tkinter.

Other have also pointed out that Python with TK 8.5 generates a lot of 
fork/exec error messages in Console, and I can confirm this. (Bugs filed 
at python.org.)  I'm not sure if this is a problem or not--I haven't 
observed any performance problems with Python/Tkinter 8.5.

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com