Re: [swarm-hackers] Old autoconf build process is broken in current trunk

[Scott Christley]

On Nov 25, 2009, at 5:28 PM, Bill Northcott wrote:

On 26/11/2009, at 11:33 AM, Scott Christley wrote:

On Nov 25, 2009, at 3:15 PM, Bill Northcott wrote:

I thought from your previous email that I needed --enable-openstep to use the Apple runtime.

I never considered before using tcl/tk GUI together with Apple runtime, as I said before I didn't want to invalidate your previous Mac work which used the GNU runtime.

As I said the old Mac work is totally invalidated by events anyway.  So there is no point trying to preserve it

There will need to be more work to do this properly, because if you use the Apple runtime, you pretty much have to by default use NSObject and Cocoa, they are intimately tied together with the objc runtime.  But we want to compile the tcl/tk GUI classes instead of the Openstep ones.

I think I get the association between Apple's runtime and NSObject,  But as I understood it you have amended the code so that the root SwarmObject with its phasic architecture is built on NSObject and does not grovel in the runtime beyond documented APIs.  What does this have to do with the GUI?

Nothing directly.  It is just there is only a single configure option, it picks both Openstep GUI *and* Apple runtime at the same time.  And in the code its using one macro for both scenarios, so we need two macros, so we can separate.  Because you say your old Mac work is invalidated, then we can just jump forward and automatically assume Apple runtime if we are on a Mac OSX system.

Can you tell me what other packages I should install.  I essentially just need the TCL/TK framework for Mac?

You need Tcl/Tk and BLT.  PNG, HDF5 are optional frills.  There some issues:
Currently there are three versions of Tk for MacOS X
 1.  The system Tk is fat (i386, x86_64, ppc7400) Carbon based code for versions 8.4 and 8.5.  BLT 2.4 assumes X11 and although someone did get BLT working with it , but it never got debugged.  The file command shows this Tk as including x86_64.  I don't quite get that because it is linked to the Carbon framework which is not 64-bit - go figure.  Maybe this helps http://www.carbondev.com/site/?page=64-bit+Carbon
2.  The upcoming Tk 8.6 will have a full Cocoa implementation with no Carbon.  You can easily build this from sources, but I have no idea how to get BLT to work with it.
3.  Tk 8.4 and 8.5 can still be built with X11 on MacOS X.  For my last release I distributed a Tk 8.4-X11 framework with BLT and I have built an 8.5 version but backed off because of the 8.5 font issues which I read about.  I only have ppc versions of this code.

My thought was to just build a fat X11 version of Tk8.4 with BLT.  It would use the System Tcl which is of course not involved with the GUI.  That would let me release a working fat binary for 10.5 and 10.6.
The next stage would be a Cocoa GUI version not using Tcl/Tk.

Sounds confusing.  Have you tried the macport of BLT?

http://blt.darwinports.com/

Scott