[vtk-developers] The vtkTkRenderWidget in VTK 6

[David Cole]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 4:36 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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



I understand completely. Unfortunately, I can't volunteer my time for
this task, but I could oversee getting Tcl-related changes merged into
CMake if somebody does the leg-work on it.

I would feel more comfortable giving this a +2 if I could get the
changes from gerrit, and see that the tests that are being
re-activated are passing when I do my own test build...

The changes look reasonable to me, but I have not built/tried this yet.


Cheers,
David C.