[Tkinter-discuss] Tcl/TK issue with viewVC (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Cameron Laird]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 11:27:31PM +0100, Michael Lange wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Mar 2013 20:38:31 +0000
> "Glasgow, Steven R CIV USARMY TRADOC ANALYSIS CTR (US)"
> <steven.r.glasgow.civ at mail.mil> wrote:
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> > Thank you for the reply.  In fact, my Tk does NOT have thread support
> > (great example you provided on how to find out).  As I'm not the one
> > that installs applications, I'll need to sound a little intelligent to
> > our IT department to get them to do it correctly.  When Tkinter is
> > installed is there an option provided that allows thread support to be
> > added (or not)?  What do I need to tell them to do to get me the thread
> > support that I need?
> > 
> > Also, don't know if this has anything to do with it or not...  When
> > this RHEL 6.3 machine was initially built it only had 64-bit libraries,
> > the 32-bit ones were added later.  I believe Tkinter was installed
> > before the 32-bit libraries were added.  Could this be an issue, if
> > viewVC requires 32-bit?  Should we just reinstall Tkinter?
> 
> I'm afraid the procedure is not trivial, if no precompiled packages are
> available for the particular system; they would have to compile tcl and tk
> with --enable-threads (iirc that's the name of the ./configure option) and
> then compile python against the new Tcl/Tk.
> 
> However, when I take a second glance at the traceback, in particular the
> following lines:
> 
>   File "/awars2a/Applicatio​ns/viewvc/viewvc-1-1​-18/bin/standalone.p​y",
>     line 671, in ready self.title_lbl.confi​g(text='ViewVC standalone
>     server at\n' + server.url)
> 
> I am beginning to suspect (though I admit that I was too lazy to
> thoroughly look through the code) that in fact the code is buggy as it
> seems to try to change the Tkinter.Label's text from the child thread.
> Even better, when I look at:
> http://viewvc.tigris.org/svn/viewvc/trunk/bin/standalone.py
> these lines (resp. the use of Tkinter at all) are missing, so maybe they
> actually found out about the bug and fixed it.
> 
> So I guess that maybe it is the best bet to try the latest
> development version of viewVC.
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I'm a little foggy what we're trying to solve.  The parts of which
I'm certain are:
*)  Michael is (as always) giving good help;
*)  installation of ActivePython might be a
    good way to cut through a lot of noise;
    and
*)  in any case, even if it's occasionally,
    arcane, getting Tkinter to work *is* a
    solved problem, even on *.mil hosts.  I'm
    sure we can be successful at this, given
    enough information and attention.