[Tkinter-discuss] Help

[David Cortesi]

> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 2:33 AM, Ned Deily <nad at acm.org> wrote:
> That's not quite accurate.  With Mac OS  X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), Apple
> distributes both a Tcl/Tk 8.4 and 8.5 and does not distribute a Python
> 3.x, only Python 2.6 and 2.5.  If you are using a Python 3.1.x installer
> for Mac OS X from python.org, it is linked only with Tk 8.4, although
> you can install a more recent version of Tcl/Tk 8.4 from ActiveState.
> Python 3.2, which is scheduled to be officially released this weekend,
> will have two OS X installers, one only for OS X 10.6 and linked with
> Tcl/Tk 8.5.  However, there are a number of serious problems with the
> version of Tcl/Tk 8.5 currently supplied by Apple with OS X 10.6;  to
> successfully use tkinter (and IDLE) with this version you must also
> install the most recent ActiveState Tcl/Tk 8.5.9 version for OS X.
>

Thank you for clarifying. However, I believe I will stand by my closing
sentence which you did not quote, "This is a long-standing problem with no
simple solution for the beginner." (Georges, who asked the original
question, is clearly a beginner.)

I am pleased to hear that the next Py3 will begin to recognize this problem
with "two installers" but it is not clear from your brief description how
this will help. If both installers follow the former practice, of
hard-coding the path to /System/Frameworks/(etc) into the tkinter module,
neither will be able to use the ActiveState Tcl, which doesn't install into
/System. For Python 3.1, the only solution I found was to use ActiveState's
latest Python with ActiveState's latest Tcl/Tk.

Will the new python.org package do something smart, like finding all Tcl/Tk
frameworks at install time and offering the user a choice? Or by using a
shell variable in tkinter to locate Tcl/Tk dynamically at run time?

Dave Cortesi
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