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

Hello Monks,

This is both a news and a search for help...

A previous thread about Tk::Zinc from smackdab , flyingmoose, and merlyn expressed some interests in Tk::Zinc. However the version at that time was not working with perlTk 804 on linux.

The new Tk::Zinc release available on CPAN now works with ptk804 on linux. The update doc is also available on http://www.tkzinc.org/index.php?n=Main.Documentation (previous site has been stolen www.openatc.org)

There are still some serious limitations for a better availability of TkZinc. I am quite sure monks with high levels C skills could provide some generous help for the following points:
- we still do not know how to make it work on winXP with perl (the pb is more or less a makefile.pl pb and a winXP perl/tk + zinc compilation pb]. We know this is mostly perl/tk compilation problem because TkZinc works well on windows with Tcl!
- there are still some undefined symbols in the Zinc.o. This makes the "make test" fails because the PERL_DL_NONLAZY environment variable is set to 1

We knows there is a serious bug when using both perl/tk 804, and openGL due to fonts initialisation and utf-8 glyphs handling. Launching small Tk::Zinc script may require more than 15s which is of course not acceptable. This should hopefully be fixed in next release...

I hope this release offer could however interest some of you. Feedback welcome on our mailing list

  • Comment on Tk::Zinc 3.2.97 on cpan now works with perlTk 804

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Re: Tk::Zinc 3.2.97 on cpan now works with perlTk 804
by Courage (Parson) on Apr 15, 2004 at 11:57 UTC
    Actually once you have working Tcl/Tk widget, it could be available to Perl (even with perlTk syntax) *without* extra code, using Tcl::Tk module.

    For example I use in my applications pure-Tcl widgets, and therefore have much richier widget set than perlTk.

    So my advice would be not to find any compilation issues but rather use ready-to-use Tcl widget.

    As for latest development news for that module, now Jeff Hobbs (lead TCL developer), Gisle Aas, Jan Dubois spend their effort for it.

    Very latest sources of Tcl::Tk module could be obtained from http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/tcltkce/
    Fresh and more capable release will be on CPAN immediately after this weekend.

    update: corrected a typo in Jan's name

    Courage, the Cowardly Dog

[reply]
•Re: Tk::Zinc 3.2.97 on cpan now works with perlTk 804
by merlyn (Sage) on Apr 15, 2004 at 14:22 UTC
    The new Tk::Zinc release available on CPAN now works with ptk804
    But unfortunately, "works" doesn't include OSX, my laptop platform. So, I'm still going to have to watch from the sidelines and wait until someone smarter than me figures out what's wrong. {sigh}

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
    Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

[reply]
Re: Tk::Zinc 3.2.97 on cpan now works with perlTk 804
by flyingmoose (Priest) on Apr 15, 2004 at 18:53 UTC
    Awesome. You are indeed the man. I was quite impressed with the screenshots the last time I saw them, and I am looking forward to playing with it. Thanks for reminding me.

    (I'm actually running Debian Sarge now, so maybe OpenGL.pm and SDL and all the other shiny modules will work too! Go! Go! Spiffy Perl Game Development!)

    As a heads up, it looks like your CPAN dependencies might need tweaking. It doesn't check to see if you already have Tk.pm and Tk::PNG.pm.

    update:Doesn't compile easily and then has test failures :) ... Also (installing on a fairly raw system) the test failures really don't explain the failures sometimes, though I'm sure most of them are just missing fonts and the like. For convience, I've attached my test failures below...

    Read more... (3 kB)

    Anybody care to take a shot at this one? Forcing the install leads to success of most demos, though it still attempts to do things like call nonexistant methods like Tk::After::Cancelled->cancel (or something). It also looks like there are quite a few warnings, but otherwise very very cool. The radar demo is great.

[reply]
[d/l]
      For convience, I've attached my test failures below...

      Thanks for your reply...

      In your case (debian sarge) it seems I do not have the pb (I mentionned) with the PERL_DL_NONLAZY=1. But you are right. They were some remaining warning in some sub-modules which make some test fail. I just eliminated them for next released.

      Thanks!

[reply]
        I figured some of the warnings might have been false, so I did a force install and tried out a few demos. The "triple spinning wheel" in zinc_contrib, for instance, doesn't show the spinning wheels on this particular box, but it does on my (other) Debian Sarge box at work. Not exactly sure what is up there, but I'll look around and see if I can get some more information for you. The radar demo seemed to work well enough.
[reply]

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