19th European Tcl/Tk Users Meeting 2023 and 7th OpenACS Conference

General information, presentations, photos and videos are available at https://openacs.org/conf2023/info/ and at https://ssl.webpack.de/www.eurotcl.eu/pastevents.html


WhenJuly 20th and July 21st, 2023
WhereVienna, Austria
Email Contactmailto:[email protected]
Conference ChairsGustaf Neumann
Harald Oehlmann

Conference was great. Great presentations from OpenACS, TCL and Tk world. There were 3 panels: TCL, Tk and OpenACS.

TCL panel

Aim is to find ways to get TCL 9.0 out of the door. Harald Oehlmann and Steve Landers gave introductionary presentations.

Panel members were: Andreas Kupries (TCT), Brian Griffin, Rolf Ade, Gustaf Neumann, Jan Nijtmans (TCT, online), Steve Landers (TCT, online)

Online was very difficult. We ran one hour late. It was fun and important !

Here is the report of the moderator HaO:

First question: you statement about the state of TCL

  • Jan:
    • Encoding issue to resolve
    • 5 TIPs to do
  • Gutaf:
    • Push 9.0 even not close to perfection. OpenACS will anyway wait for 9.1.
  • Rolf:
    • Resolve encoding issues
    • We will anyway need an extended alpha/beta phase to roll out
  • Brian:
    • Automate release progress
    • Regular alpha/beta
  • Andreas
    • Encodings to resolve
    • glob and no open is a real problem I was hit when having special characters on Linux. This should be resolved
    • Focus on 9
    • Make a cut in compatibility
    • Automated test/release
  • Steve
    • Github builds may be distributed
  • Marcus (Audience): propose a docker image

2nd question: How to get 9.0 out of the door?

  • Jan:
    • make again a key-group meeting in September after holiday season to sort-out the encoding issues
    • solve the small points
    • I don't make any forecarst for timing (again)
  • Steve
    • Resolve small TIPs ASAP
    • Resolve encoding end September
    • Single file executable for testing
    • Conversation with Don (who looks currently at the core)
  • Gustaf:
    • Signal to Don: we are happy with the current state
    • Finish discussions. Solve in small groups.
    • Use automation for easier release
  • Andreas:
    • List of TIP's to consider (see Jan's list)
    • Other TIPs are out of scope

Tk panel

Introductiory presentation was not shown due to technical problems.

Tk pannel members were Peter Spjuth, Csaba Nementi, Brian Griffin.

Moderator HaO log:

Question 1: Your statement about state of Tk

  • Peter
    • Get out old croft in Tk 9
    • Good looking would be nice
  • Brian
    • Tk offers good stuff. Worked with QT, which is also great but complementary
  • Csaba
    • We need more modern skins. TTK is 20 years old and no new core skins.
    • Remove support for monocrome displays for Tk 9
  • John (from Audience)
    • We make Android full screen apps and have developped a framework working with that. On multi-platform and multi language, there are lots of challenges: Right to Left fonts, some Asiatic fonts have much bigger height.
    • The scaling work is great. We would volonteer to provide code and help.

Question 2: What do you think of the new Text widget

  • Csaba
    • New Text widget should be in trunk. Legacy text widget has constant performance degradation over the versions, getting worse.
    • For me, new text widget should replace current text widget

Thank you all ! Awesome conference !


stevel - 2023-07-22 00:18:21

Re ttk themes, I use the Sun Valley ttk theme from [L1 ]. Although that page focusses on tkinter and Python, the theme is written in Tcl/Tk and easily installed into a Tcl/Tk program. Assuming the author agrees I suspect those could be dropped into Tk without much effort. There are examples at [L2 ] including https://github.com/rdbende/Sun-Valley-ttk-examples/blob/master/Widget%20demo/Screenshot.png?raw=true. There are also two other themes linked from that page, Azure https://github.com/rdbende/Azure-ttk-theme/blob/main/screenshot.png?raw=true and Forest https://github.com/rdbende/Forest-ttk-theme/blob/master/Forest-light%20screenshot.png?raw=true