From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Feb 27 02:23:12 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id CAA29112 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 27 Feb 1996 02:23:12 -0800 (PST) Received: from hda.com (hda.com [199.232.40.182]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id CAA29102 for ; Tue, 27 Feb 1996 02:23:07 -0800 (PST) Received: (from dufault@localhost) by hda.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id FAA03315; Tue, 27 Feb 1996 05:35:09 -0500 From: Peter Dufault Message-Id: <199602271035.FAA03315@hda.com> Subject: Tcl/Tk sysinstall (was Re: Win32...) To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 05:35:08 -0500 (EST) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <5097.825358007@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Feb 26, 96 10:06:47 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > Unless something really awesome comes over the horizon, perhaps with > java doing the custom graphics and your "GUI window" really being > somebody's netscape window, well, I think TCL and Tk are the ones to > back. I'm definitely going with this combination for my own work, and > if anything I think that FreeBSD's committment to TCL has been > insufficiently energetic. Even just a "boilerplate" library and TCL > interpreter available with the base system, with all the little "must > have" add-ons already bolted on, would be a great stimulus for a new > and better class of applications. sysinstall (reborn "setup") and the > pkg_* tools would definitely be my first clients for such a library, > seeing as I've already been forced to do this myself just to bootstrap > my own efforts. > Tcl/TK is the best 90% solution I've seen. I've used it a lot lately, including my own fastgraph widget for displaying collected signals. My biggest complaint is the creeping size of my scripts, some of which have ballooned to 1000 lines, and the difficulty to really get everything right which I believe would be more easily done in C. Starting over now I'm sure I'd do it better. The newer TK also addresses some of the comments I've seen on this thread and does a better job without any tweaking. The remote control works great (I have one master control that controls 4 slaves in parallel, still with the option of poking at the slaves when something has to be done specifically to them) and can see where you could do something similar for an install that could upgrade a bunch of machines at once. Too bad "send" support isn't native in tcl as then you could have the clients non-X based. This is a good idea that I hope someone has the time to push further. -- Peter Dufault Real-Time Machine Control and Simulation HD Associates, Inc. Voice: 508 433 6936 dufault@hda.com Fax: 508 433 5267