[Pythonmac-SIG] Chinese glyphs in Python 3

[Russell E. Owen]

In article <200905271228.n4RCSCEi021872 at penicillin.media.mit.edu>,
 Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:

> I've found the source of this bug: Tcl/Tk's rendering of Unicode data  
> is broken on OSX. Luckily this is fixed on Tcl/Tk 8.5, but that  
> doesn't help you very much because the Python installers all link to  
> the (system install of) Tcl/Tk 8.4 and that version is not binary  
> compatible with the later version.

If this bug is fixed in Tcl/Tk 8.4.19 then it would suffice to build the 
MacOS X python in such a way that it can use a 3rd-party installed 
Tcl/Tk 8.4. Unfortunately that is not the case of the recent python.org 
MacOS X binary installers (at least those that I tried); this is an 
issue I'd be happy to help with if I can do anything. (I can build 
Python in such a way at it is compatible, but I don't know how to 
package it into an installer.)

> Which brings the question: is there anyone on the list that would like  
> to look into providing two copies of Tkinter in the binary installers  
> on OSX? This would preferably install both copies of the tkinter  
> extension and magicly select the right copy to use at runtime. That  
> way Tkinter, and more importantly IDLE, would work out of the box and  
> anyone that would need a better version of Tk can use that by  
> installing Tk themself.

An intriguing idea, though it sounds a bit dangerous to me that it would 
work automatically because of the significant differences between the 
two (or at least the significant enhancements in 8.5).

Might it make sense to provide a separate installer that would replace 
_tkinter with an 8.5 version, but the user would run that explicitly 
only if they had installed 8.5?

-- Russell

P.S. is there any public news or rumors if Snow Leopard has Tcl/Tk 8.5?