[Pythonmac-SIG] What about the Tcl/Tk problems?

[Corran Webster]

> At 1:29 PM +0100 16-02-2000, Alexander Schliep wrote:
> >On Jul 9,  7:48am, Just van Rossum wrote:
> >> I think the main problem is that the Tcl/Tk version shipped with MacPython
> >> is too old. Neither Jack nor I have the time to fix this (which is
>also due
> >> to the fact that *we* don't use it...), so if you could help here, that
> >> would be Great!
> >
> >Which would be easier if not Codewarrior ($$$) but MPW was used for
> >building MacPython. Last time I enquired there actually was a reason
> >for that concerning some library (cant search my mail archives right now).
> >
> >Nevertheless it greatly reduces the number of people able to help (e.g.,
>me).
>
> Nevertheless nor Jack nor I have the time to add MPW support for MacPython.
> If *you* could contirbute that, that would of course be excellent.

This might be time to mention my notes at:

http://www.nevada.edu/~cwebster/Python/MPWHOWTO/MPWHOWTO.html

which at least get you running extensions to python using MPW (linking into
the regular PythonCore from the distribution).  I haven't tried it, but if
you had a  recent version of the Mac distribution of Tcl/Tk, it should be
possible to compile _tkinter to link to both the Python core and the Tcl/Tk
shared libraries, aand so you may be able to get a new version of Tkinter
without having to go through the pain of an MPW-based conversion of both
Python and Tcl/Tk.

That said, it's not inconceivable that a Python MPW tool can be written - I
experimented with this last year and got it to compile and link, but file
system support was out of whack (couldn't import modules) and I ran out of
time to work on it.  Getting it to interact nicely with MPW SIOW may be a
bit more work, but there is, I believe, some support already in there from
way back when.

Hopefully I'll have some time to look at this again in the next litle while.

Regards,
Corran