Cloverleaf and TK (x-windowing)

[Rob Lindsey]

Is anyone out in the Cloverleaf Community/World still using X-windowing technology with TK (hciwish/wish/wishx)?

If TK was to be removed from the Cloverleaf supported standard of TCL/TK, how many people/groups/companies are still using the older TK technology to look at SMAT files via hciguismat and/or Alerting someone via hciguimsg.  The hciguismat and hciguimsg would work in a future release of Cloverleaf.

Programs that would be affected (there may be others):

– hciguimsg

– hcismat

– hcitimegraph

– hciverify

– hciwish

– wish

– wishx

– hciguigraft

– tcpTestLauncher

Please reply to this thread if your group/company still uses this technology and what programs are you currently using.

Thanks In Advance for your time

Rob Lindsey

Topic

[Jeff Dinsmore]

What would be the purpose of removing Tk?

Are you suggesting that Tk be completely removed from the Cloverleaf install, or simply that Tk-dependent modules in Cloverleaf would be rewritten to use some other GUI toolkit?

Jeff Dinsmore
Chesapeake Regional Healthcare

[Rob Lindsey]

Jeff,

I am part of the Product Advisory Board for Cloverleaf and Infor is asking how many companies/teams/groups/users use this technology.  If no one is using the technology, my guess is, they will drop the support of the TK modules/coding in the application.  If there is a large group of companies/groups/teams that are still using it they will most likely continue to keep TK in the application.

Infor just wants to take a “pulse” of the users to find out what they should do in the future.

IMO, this is a good thing that they are asking and not just dropping the technology and then letting people be surprised when they upgrade.

Hope the above makes sense.

Rob[/b]

[Rob Abbott]

Hi all,

The thinking behind this plan is as follows:

No Tk GUIs have been supported in Cloverleaf for several releases.  Any GUI functionality was re-written long ago in the Java IDE.  It requires time and resources to keep Tk alive in Cloverleaf; one of the things we want to do for Cloverleaf 6.1.1 is upgrade Tcl to 8.6.  Which would require us to upgrade/test/QA the Tk components we ship.  

We would rather spend time and resources on cool new features than keeping support for Tk.  If we keep supporting Tk, it’ll take longer for us to get new releases out.  So we’d like to remove it to streamline the release process.

Rob Abbott
Cloverleaf Emeritus

[Steve Williams]

Here’s what a quick analysis reveals from v5.8 to v6.1:

which hciguimsg

v5.8> /quovadx/cis5.8/integrator/bin/hciguimsg

v6.1> hciguimsg: Command not found.

which hcismat

v5.8> /quovadx/cis5.8/integrator/bin/hcismat

v6.1> /cloverleaf/cis6.1/integrator/contrib/hcismat

which hcitimegraph

v5.8> /quovadx/cis5.8/integrator/bin/hcitimegraph

v6.1> hcitimegraph: Command not found.

which hciverify

v5.8> /quovadx/cis5.8/integrator/bin/hciverify

v6.1> /cloverleaf/cis6.1/integrator/bin/hciverify

which hciwish

v5.8> /quovadx/cis5.8/integrator/bin/hciwish

v6.1> hciwish: Command not found.

which wish

v5.8> /quovadx/cis5.8/integrator/bin/wish

v6.1> /usr/bin/wish

which wishx

v5.8> /quovadx/cis5.8/integrator/bin/wishx

v6.1> wishx: Command not found.

which hciguigraft

v5.8> /quovadx/cis5.8/integrator/contrib/hciguigraft

v6.1> /cloverleaf/cis6.1/integrator/contrib/hciguigraft

which tcpTestLauncher

v5.8> /quovadx/cis5.8/integrator/contrib/tcpTestLauncher

v6.1> /cloverleaf/cis6.1/integrator/contrib/tcpTestLauncher

[Steve Williams]

To be fair, it might be easier to install TCL/Tk 8.4 parallel to 8.6 and code the she-bang line to called the old 8.4 install. For Windows users, it would be a more difficult problem.

Of course, what would really be good is for these tools to be rewritten in Java once and for all.

[Author]

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