bcrowell2 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Does anyone know the status of perl/tk these days? Is it actively maintained? I believe the original developer was Nick Ing-Simmons, and ca. 5 years ago he announced he would stop doing maintenance work on perl/tk. He's now deceased. I seem to remember that someone else did step up at some point to become the maintainer, but googling isn't telling me who that might have been.

I have a medium-sized (15k lines of code) open-source Perl/Tk app, and I'm wondering if I need an exit strategy.

What prompts me to ask this is that a user recently filed a bug report saying that unicode was not properly handled in a file-opening dialog. This seemed to trace back to an issue in Tk::getOpenFile (perl/tk does support unicode in general, right?), but I couldn't figure out who to contact about the getOpenFile issue. CPAN still lists Ing-Simmons as the maintainer of perl/tk.

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Re: status of perl/tk?
by Tux (Canon) on Dec 24, 2012 at 08:54 UTC

    I am a pretty active user of perl/Tk and most of my desktop applications that need some kind of GUI are written in it. The huge advantage of Tk over the alternatives like Wx or Gtk2 is that Tk works out out of the box on almost any OS, including the OS's I have work on like HP-UX and AIX. I never got Wx to work on 64bit versions of HP-UX and AIX and I don't bother anymore as Tk works painlessly.

    Tk is currently maintained by Slaven Rezić (who is also listed as current maintainer in meta::cpan), and the github repository is publicly available, so you can checkout activity yourself.

    In case of your statement that Tk doesn't support Unicode, you should pass a lot more information than what you did, as the support not only depends on the version of Tk, but also, and maybe only, on the version of perl itself. I'd argue that the absolute minimum version of perl to deal with Unicode in a reasonable reliable way is 5.8.7, but I'd advice 5.14.2 or 5.16.2 to make sure all (Unicode-related) bugs you encounter are addressed.

    You have stated no information about what OS you use, what version of the OS, what version of perl (it can also be a broken vendor relase) and what version of Tk. Nor did you come up with an example that we could check.


    Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn
[reply]

      Thanks very much for your helpful reply.

      What made me think that Perl/Tk didn't have an active maintainer was that its CPAN page http://search.cpan.org/~ni-s/Tk-804.027/pod/UserGuide.pod said "Nick Ing-Simmons" at the top. I should have looked more carefully. That just indicates that it's still in a directory with his name, not that he's the current maintainer.

      I've filed a bug report for the bug in Tk: https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=82203

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Re: status of perl/tk?
by bulk88 (Priest) on Dec 24, 2012 at 03:07 UTC
    Perl/Tk is a fork of the Tk library. Tkx is a marshaller to the Tcl language/Tcl libraries. Tkx has no brains in it, so its just whatever the Tcl interp offers.
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Re: status of perl/tk?
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 23, 2012 at 21:35 UTC
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[d/l]
      Thanks. It's worrisome that there are bugs 2 years old that are marked critical and have not been fixed. No bug less than 3 years old has been fixed.
[reply]

        Thanks. It's worrisome that there are bugs 2 years old that are marked critical and have not been fixed. No bug less than 3 years old has been fixed.

        You worry too much :) look around the bug cue at your favorite project and compare , its really not that many

        OTOH, lots of the bugs are inherited, Tcl::pTk side-steps the issue

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[reply]
        Thanks for the info. It looks like Tkx doesn't have the same syntax as Perl/Tk, so it's not an option for my existing project.
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