Re: [Chicken-users] Chicken/Tk

[Vasilij Schneidermann]

Hello Heinz,

I've looked into the state of GUI eggs for some time and even
contributed a few of my own, way before the release of C5.

> I'm planning on using Tk in a project, and was wondering what's the current
> status of Tk support in Chicken. So Chicken 4 has two eggs, pstk and tk. Of
> these, pstk is listed under "Unsupported or redundant". What's the reason
> for that? I thought pstk was essentially an enhanced version of Wolf-Dieter
> Busch's Chicken/Tk.

You're correct, pstk is an enhanced version of tk with extra commands
(most notably for the ttk extension which allows limited theming) and a
more agreeable license.  Back then I've asked Felix Winkelmann the same
question about its status, the result of that discussion was that he
didn't know either, but agreed to swap both (so that tk would be
obsoleted and pstk in the GUI section) provided that a new maintainer
steps up.  I didn't consider myself good enough for the task back then,
so nothing happened.

> Also, is anybody working on porting either of these eggs to Chicken 5? I'll
> probably stick to Chicken 4 for my project for the time being, since a
> number of distros don't ship C5 yet. I'd volunteer to port the egg myself at
> some point in the future though, once I do transition to 5.

I've worked on porting a number of eggs to ensure everything popular can
be used with C5, but stopped in favor of other projects I'm working on.
Porting the pstk egg shouldn't be hard though, the most challenging bit
would be finding a maintainer.

> On a side note, a while ago I was in contact with Mr. Busch and asked if he
> would relicense the tk egg under BSD terms, to which he agreed. As far as I
> can tell he hasn't actually taken any steps to do so, however. In any case,
> afaik the "Bremer License" is not applicable here, because it specifically
> and exclusively covers the OSCI library, of which Chicken/Tk is not a
> component. So in it's current state, Chicken/Tk is not free software,
> strictly speaking.

This is lamentable, but not the end of the world.  If a maintainer steps
up for pstk, it would supersede the tk egg and no licensing issues will
arise from it.

Vasilij

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