beginners choice: wx or tk?
Ned Deily
nad at acm.org
Sun Jul 12 01:01:25 EDT 2015
In article <mnsfqm$nvg$1 at dont-email.me>,
Kevin Walzer <kw at codebykevin.com> wrote:
> On 7/11/15 10:48 AM, Laura Creighton wrote:
> > Unless I was misinformed 2 weeks or so ago when I asked, that is the
> > problem. Tcl/Tk 8.6 works (and is shipped with) OSX, but tkinter
> > and idle don't work with it. We will see what Ned Deily says
> > when he gets around to reading this.
>
> You were misinformed. Tkinter has worked fine with Tk 8.6 for a long
> time. The issues with Tk on the Mac, owing to Apple's force migration of
> GUI libraries to Cocoa, have finally been more or less resolved, and Tk
> 8.6.4 is now quite stable on OS X.
I believe Laura is referring to the Pythons installed by python.org
installers and it is true that their versions of tkinter and IDLE are
not linked with 8.6 (but it is not correct that 8.6 is shipped with OS
X). As I replied earlier, the issue is not that Tkinter doesn't work
with Tk 8.6 on OS X: as you say, it does. The issues are that (1) Apple
doesn't supply 8.6 with OS X; (2) the Pythons supplied by the python.org
installers for OS X have traditionally depended on using Apple-supplied
Tk's shipped with OS X (with an override to ActiveTcl if installed);
(3) Apple has not updated the version of Tk 8.5 shipped with recent
releases of OS X, thus still shipping an early version of Cocoa Tk with
critical bugs that have been fixed upstream by you (Kevin) and others;
(4) while liberally licensed, ActiveTcl is not free or open source
software so it is problematic to require all tkinter users to have to
install it when using python.org Pythons. The best solution at the
moment would be for the python.org OS X installers to supply their own
builds of Tcl/Tk (like the python.org Windows installers do). That
hasn't happened yet (we tried one approach a while back but ran into
problems with some key third-party Python packages expecting files to be
in particular locations); I hope to try again in the near future.
--
Ned Deily,
nad at acm.org
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