Version 10 of Windows 95

Updated 2007-10-11 16:33:14 by suchenwi

Richard Suchenwirth 2007-10-11 - Successor to Windows 3.11. Even older (three years) than Windows 98, but still going strong in some places, e.g. my ancient 200MHz 48MB box at home - where most of my many hundreds of fun projects were made...

From 8.5, W95 is no longer supported by Tcl/Tk. Here's my travelogue how I managed building Tcl/Tk with MinGW and running, with only two lines of code changed :^)

Building Tcl 8.5b1 on W95 SE almost worked... just in make install I got

 Installing time zone data
 /bin/sh: ./tclsh85.exe: Permission denied
 make: *** [install-tzdata] Error 126

and a pop-up which roughly translated says

 missing Export-USER32.DLL:MsgWaitForMultipleObjectsEx

So it's true when they say W95 is no longer supported... :( The sore spot is

 $ grep -n MultipleObjectsEx *.c
 tclWinNotify.c:475:     result = MsgWaitForMultipleObjectsEx(1, &tsdPtr->event,
        timeout,

GPS suggested to try it without the "Ex" - this lets make install come through. make test still running (hey, this old box has only 200MHz...) In fact, it seems to hang after

 ---- Result was:
 timeout {} foobarbaz timeout
 ---- Result should have been (exact matching):
 {} timeout foobarbaz timeout
 ==== io-6.56 FAILED

A more patient retry shows that io.test just takes very long, but ultimately terminates, and lets other tests carry on. Here's one failed test which I'm not so sure of (uppercase drive letters seem quite Win-idiomatic to me):

 ==== filesystem-1.38 file normalisation with volume relative FAILED
 ==== Contents of test case:
    set path "[string range [lindex $drives 0] 0 1]foo"
    set dir [pwd]
    cd [lindex $drives 1]
    set res [file norm $path]
    cd $dir
    set res
 ---- Result was:
 C:/foo
 ---- Result should have been (exact matching):
 c:/foo
 ==== filesystem-1.38 FAILED

Another one, which came twice (also as winFCmd-1.19.2), is also not clear to me:

 ==== winFCmd-1.13.2 TclpRenameFile: errno: ENOENT FAILED
 ==== Contents of test case:
    cleanup
    list [catch {testfile mv nul tf1} msg] $msg
 ---- Result was:
 1 EACCES
 ---- Result should have been (exact matching):
 1 ENOENT
 ==== winFCmd-1.13.2 FAILED

After I took winNotify.test out of the race, the test suite went through, with these statistics:

 all.tcl:        Total        23324        Passed        22420        Skipped        872        Failed        32

Here are the failures:

 ==== event-11.4 Tcl_VwaitCmd procedure FAILED
 ==== event-12.4 Tcl_UpdateCmd procedure FAILED
 ==== fCmd-9.7 file rename: comprehensive: file to existing file FAILED
 ==== filesystem-1.38 file normalisation with volume relative FAILED
 ==== http-3.8 http::geturl FAILED
 ==== http-3.13 http::geturl socket leak test FAILED
 ==== http-4.14 http::Event FAILED
 ==== io-13.6 TranslateInputEOL: auto mode: saw cr in last segment FAILED
 ==== Tcl_Main-8.4 StdinProc: handles stdin close FAILED
 ==== Tcl_Main-8.5 StdinProc: handles interactive stdin close FAILED
 ==== socket-3.2 server with several clients FAILED
 ==== socket-9.1 testing spurious events FAILED
 ==== socket-9.2 testing async write, fileevents, flush on close FAILED
 ==== socket-9.3 testing EOF stickyness FAILED
 ==== socket-11.11 testing spurious events FAILED
 ==== socket-11.12 testing EOF stickyness FAILED
 ==== timer-3.1 TimerHandlerEventProc procedure: event masks FAILED
 ==== timer-3.2 TimerHandlerEventProc procedure: multiple timers FAILED
 ==== timer-6.4 Tcl_AfterCmd procedure, ms argument FAILED
 ==== timer-6.5 Tcl_AfterCmd procedure, ms argument FAILED
 ==== timer-6.29 Tcl_AfterCmd procedure, info option, script with NULL FAILED
 ==== winDde-3.5 DDE request locally FAILED
 ==== winFCmd-1.13.2 TclpRenameFile: errno: ENOENT FAILED
 ==== winFCmd-1.19.2 TclpRenameFile: errno == ENOENT FAILED
 ==== winFCmd-6.10 TclpRemoveDirectory: attr == -1 FAILED
 ==== winFCmd-7.11 TraverseWinTree: call TraversalCopy: DOTREE_PRED FAILED
 ==== winFCmd-7.19 TraverseWinTree: call TraversalCopy: DOTREE_POSTD FAILED
 ==== winFCmd-9.2 TraversalDelete: DOTREE_F FAILED
 ==== winpipe-4.2 Tcl_WaitPid: return of exception codes, SIGFPE FAILED
 ==== winpipe-4.3 Tcl_WaitPid: return of exception codes, SIGSEGV FAILED
 ==== winpipe-4.4 Tcl_WaitPid: return of exception codes, SIGILL FAILED
 ==== winpipe-4.5 Tcl_WaitPid: return of exception codes, SIGINT FAILED

Configuring Tk went well, in make I spotted a warning:

 D:\MSYS\src\tk8.5b1\win\tkWinEmbed.c:49: warning: 'EmbeddedEventProc' declared `
 static' but never defined

A bigger problem was another Win symbol, which I just commented out in tkWinX.c, near the end:

   /* SendInput(1, &inp, sizeof(inp)); */

After this, win85.exe does not come up, but tclsh85.exe with package require Tk does, and responds as I'd expect... So yes, there's even some hope for ninety-fivers... :^)

Not all is well, though. A canvas acts and reacts decently, while a text widget reacts to insertions from console only after touching it, and to typing in itself very sloppy. So there are still deeper problems.


Oh, and besides ActiveTcl 8.4, some things like eTcl 1.0-rc23 and tcltcc run right out of the binary box here.


Category Operating System