[vtk-developers] The vtkTkRenderWidget in VTK 6

[David Gobbi]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 2:03 PM, David Cole <david.cole at kitware.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 12:07 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The vtkTkRenderWidget patch is stuck in gerrit so I'm here on the list
>> begging for reviewers.  I really want to get this into VTK and onto
>> the dashboards before the 6.0 release.  There are tons of old but
>> useful examples (in both Tcl and Python) that use the TkRenderWidget.
>> There are also some currently de-activated tests that we can
>> reactivate after this patch is merged.
>>
>
> What are those tests?
>
> Why not just do that (re-activate those tests) as another commit at
> the end of this topic branch?

I'll do that.  Part of the reason that I sent this email was just to
see if I could get just at least some response, critical or otherwise,
before I invested any more of my time into the topic.

>> http://review.source.kitware.com/#/t/1118/
>>
>> I have to warn people in advance that the way that the CMake files
>> find the Tcl/Tk libraries is fairly messy.  It looks like around five
>> years ago someone moved the code that finds the Tcl and Tk libs
>> into vtkWrapTcl.cmake, which worked fine with pre-modular VTK but
>> messes things up now that everything is modular, it forces us to load
>> vtkWrapTcl.cmake in odd places.  This is something that will have to
>> be fixed eventually (not only for the Tcl libs, but for the Python
>> libs as well) but it isn't something I'll have time to work on before
>> the release.
>>
>
> Is there something wrong with the CMake-provided
> FindTCL/FindTclsh/FindTclStub such that we can't just do this?
>
>   find_package(TCL)
>   find_package(Tclsh)
>   find_package(TclStub)
>
> If so, why don't we address those problems in the CMake release so VTK
> can simplify its code? Or are there other things besides "finding"
> that happen in vtkWrapTcl.cmake?

In addition to find_package, the code in vtkWrapTcl also does some
special debug-library stuff, and generates cmake errors if needed
items are not found, but I have not looked into it in any depth.  I
think "we" should address these problems.  I just don't want "we" to
just mean "me".  ;)

 - David