[Caml-list] Re: Tcl/Tk and RH 9

[skaller <skaller@ozemail.com.au>]

On Sun, 2003-08-10 at 11:43, Jacques Garrigue wrote:
> From: skaller <skaller@ozemail.com.au>
> 
> > Just a comment: I have just installed RedHat 9 on my box.
> > Tcl/Tk is no longer a standard package, which is as it should be,
> > its an old, archaic system which no longer deserves any support.
> 
> RedHat is free to decide whatever they want, but Tk is still the
> simplest way to develop some software. Tcl/Tk itself is in version
> 8.4, it had unicode support earlier than Gtk, and is still under
> active development, and I see no need to kill it.

I do. First, it isn't threadable. Second, whilst the
widgets it supports are good, its widget set is not only
small, it doesn't have certain crucial widgets.
There is no tree widget, for example, you need Tix for that.

The extension model is unusable. No one can write
Tk extensions. In the whole of its life, hardly any
have been written.

OTOH, there is wide community support for Gtk.

> I suppose a move to Gtk will eventually take place.
> For this Gtk2 is a requirement (Gtk lacks some essential widgets
> present in Tk).

Yeah, Gtk 1 was pretty bad. Some widgets didn't work
properly. That's the case in 2 as well :(
The edit widget is not good, compared to Tk's.
Morons are trying to copy Windows :(
It still doesn't edit correctly.

The tree widget doesn't work properly in your demo
by the way: when you delete an item it just clears
the line, doesn't redraw the tree properly.

>  But LablGtk2 is now usable enough we can start to
> think about it.

The whole of my desktop uses Gnome/Gtk.

> So yes, I see a change ahead, but certainly not in 3.07!
> And of course labltk/camltk support will not be dropped.

That was my question: whether there will be a move to Gtk.
Whilst labltk doesn't need to have support dropped,
I can't see it being worth doing continued work in it:
it becomes a deprecated tool.

Lots of nice things could be done with OcamlBrowser,
for example. You can't do that work twice. You have to pick
which model to extend. That's Tk now, until Gtk version
is up to scratch, and Gtk itself is up to scratch.

Some of the work is just too hard in Tk. For example
it doesn't reparent correctly. Gtk does. There is a 
workaround in Tk, but it only works 'to some extent'
and that workaround defeats some of its functionality.
[Basically all Tk widgets have to be top level names
or they can't be reparented: HWM is all about reparenting :-]

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