From: aakhter@... (Aamer Akhter)
Date: 2003-10-05T06:56:12+09:00
Subject: Re: tcltklib and not init'ing tk

Hidetoshi NAGAI <nagai@dumbo.ai.kyutech.ac.jp> wrote in message news:<20031005.015546.74755857.nagai@dumbo.ai.kyutech.ac.jp>...
> Hi, 
> 
> Maybe this reply mail is too late. 
> # Sorry, but I was out on business trip.  

Hidetoshi,

Thank-you for responding. It seems like these changes were in r1.39 of
tcltklib.c, while 1.38 was the version released with with 1.8.0. I
should have checked the CVS.

> > 1) is there a way to _not_ start tk? When I create a new interpreter 
> > (let's say from a non X-fwded ssh session) it may cause a failure. I'm
> > only interested in Tcl.
> 
> from ChangeLog of CVS Head, 
> ----------------------------------------------
> Fri Aug 29 17:30:15 2003  Hidetoshi NAGAI <nagai@ai.kyutech.ac.jp>
>            (snip)
>         * ext/tcltklib/tcltklib.c : can create a interpreter without Tk
> ----------------------------------------------
> Please create a Tcl interpreter by TclTkIp.new(ip_name, nil).
> 'ip_name' is the name of the interpreter which is shown with 
> 'winfo interps' and so on. 
> Usually, 2nd argument of TclTkIp.new method is given command 
> line options of 'wish' (e.g. TclTkIp.new('FOO', '-geometry 
> 500x200 -use 0x2200009') ). But if given nil or false, the 
> interpreter starts without Tk. 

I would suggest not using the argv parameter space for indicating the
non-desire for Tk. One might one to pass command line arguments to
tclsh ( in the same way as to wish)

> 
> Unfortunately, tk.rb doesn't work with the interpreter without 
> initialized Tk library. Therefore you must call TclTkIp#invoke 
> or TclTkIp#eval. If you want to wrap the control script using 
> such methods by Ruby's classes or modules, please refer TkCore 
> or TkComm moduless on tk.rb. They may help you. 
> 
> BTW, there is a known bug on tcltklib.c. It causes 'Segmentation 
> Fault' when 'vwait' or 'tkwait' command is called on the other 
> thread than 'mainloop' thread. Those commands call Tcl_DoOneEvent() 
> function. And it conflicts with the eventloop control of tcltklib.c. 
> I've been working on fixing the problem. I think I must implement 
> the routines to replace 'vwait' and 'tkwait'.

While I'm not an active user of vwait, tkwait  and espically not
threads as they're not supported in tcl-expect, I think the TKinter
python library has worked around these type of issues see:

Modules/_tkinter.c in the regular python distribution


I would like to work with yon on improving the transferability of
lists and arrays between tcl and ruby, if you are interisted.