Magically-disappearing tclsh8.5 (was: any good audio/video editing apps in macports?)

Jim Graham spooky130u at gmail.com
Sun Feb 24 11:58:26 PST 2013


On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 02:20:48PM -0500, Lawrence Vel?zquez wrote:
> On Feb 24, 2013, at 1:03 PM, Jim Graham <spooky130u at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I had to re-install it, because it magically uninstalled itself, during,
> > I suspect, the upgrade to the latest macports.
> 
> You mentioned that you upgraded to a new MacPorts base recently. Unless
> you installed it from source, the install process automatically
> performed a "port selfupdate", which would have updated your ports tree
> to tcl @8.6.0.

That's fine.  But considering the fact that there are syntax changes
between Tcl/Tk versions, removing an existing one is most definitely NOT
safe, as it could break Tcl/Tk programs that the user has written.  I
personally consider this extremely bad behavior.

> The next time you ran "port upgrade outdated" or
> something similar, MacPorts would have deactivated tcl @8.5.13 (or
> whatever your old version was) and installed tcl @8.6.0.

But it should *ONLY* do so if I have no scripts/programs that I've
written that use 8.5.x or, for that matter, 8.4.x, too---I have stuff
that uses both of these right now, as I'm slowly working on upgrading
JStrack to 8.5.x or, more likely now, 8.6.x.  I do know that at least one
of those breaks old syntax.  If macports were to uninstall the older
versions, it would break my stuff.  That is completely unsat and must
never happen unless I specifically allow it after being ASKED whether
or not to do so.

That is, unless macports updated JStrack and every other Tcl/Tk script on
my Mac to work with Tcl/Tk 8.6.  Hmmm, that would actually be nice.  I'll
tell my JStrack users that, thanks to macports, JStrack is now supported
by Tcl/Tk 8.6.x, and that there is no longer any need to keep the (very)
old Tcl/Tk 8.4.x hanging around once I port the new version (hey, I
didn't even have to touch it to get it modified!).  Cool.  Did the
upgrade re-write JStrack to use TkImage instead of Img?  Or did it
install Img for 8.6?  Same question for tcllib, etc.---did it upgrade
those?

> So, unless you at no point ran a "port upgrade", nothing magical is
> happening; this is intended behavior.

I didn't run a 'port upgrade' ... would this have prevented it from
uninstalling Tcl/Tk 8.5.x?  But now, since the macports upgrade upgraded
all of my Tcl/Tk stuff (including JStrack) to support 8.6 before it
deleted 8.5.x (which I was porting to), who cares....

> Is wish8.5 part of tk? What version of the tk port do you have
> activated?

Ummm, wish **IS** Tk.  :-)   Tcl is tclsh (or tclsh8.x.x) and Tk
is wish (or wish8.x.x).  Yes, there are additional packages, libs,
etc., that you can add, and those are also add-ons to Tcl/Tk.  Tcl is
the scripting language (tclsh), and Tk is the graphics toolkit (wish).

Now, there is also a perltk, which allows PERL to use Tk, and there
are probably similar implementations for other scripting languages,
but for Tcl/Tk (which is what I use), yes, it's Tcl (Tool Command
Language) and Tk (Toolkit).

Now it's time to check macports' work on the JStrack upgrade.  Somehow,
I'm guessing that it missed something, somewhere.

Later,
   --jim

-- 
THE SCORE:  ME:  2  CANCER:  0
73 DE N5IAL (/4)          | DMR: So fsck was originally called
spooky130u at gmail.com      |      something else.
< Running Mac OS X Lion > | Q:   What was it called?
ICBM / Hurricane:         | DMR: Well, the second letter was different.
   30.44406N 86.59909W    |    -- Dennis M. Ritchie, Usenix, June 1998.



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