tcl distribution comparison on their choice of included battery

Hello. Having not programmed in TCL for almost 6 years, I am very
surprised at current tcl document aggregated at extremely messy
wiki.tcl.tk, perhaps more surprised to see people seems to take the
messy wiki pages without much complaints. I tried a little bit to
cleaned up a few pages, but yet there are so many pages with random
information here and there.

One example is about notebook widget. I am about to select an notebook
widget to use on my application, which is required to run off from most
operating systems directly without installation, with Windows XP as
bottom line. A careful comparison shows that within the re-distribution
license limitation I could choose tclkit, wintclkit, dqkit. It turns out
to be a complicated matrix:

the "extensions" that contain a notebook widget

tclkit wintcltk dqkit Ubuntu default
iWidget N N Y N
BLT N N Y N
bWidget N Y N N
tk8.5->ttk Y Y N N


I spent a full day to figure out the notebook widget issue, it seems
every widget set contains a notebook widget and all the 'battery
included' distributions choose to include different battery.

Then the second problem: I would also need a tabular data widget. Quick
glance shows if I want to avoid the same homework for the notebook
widget, I should go ahead use tktable as mostly referred to. Yet if I
add tktable the distribution comparison gets more interesting:

tclkit wintcltk dqkit Ubuntu default
iWidget N N Y N
BLT N N Y N
bWidget N Y N N
tktable N Y Y N
tk8.5->ttk Y Y N N

So again all distribution choose different battery. In general it is a
tough decision which widget to use.

This isn't "battery included" as people would often refer to. This is
"batteries included". Battery included means developer should be able to
write program without worrying too much about distribution. There are
too many ways to do a task, and too many distributions each covering a
few ways. Developers must know which distribution covers what and decide
to learn & use a few combination of widget sets. In my case, if I choose
to use something from BLT, I should know I should avoid using bwidget
with it, but use iwdgets (look up the table and find out why).

I know simple complaints like this post would not solve any problem (to
fix it is to solve the problem) yet everybody contribute their free
time. but I just wonder perhaps someone would be interested to hear a
freshmen (refresh)'s feeling about the situation and might do something,
thus let go of the post anyway.

P.S. Worrying about the quality of the distribution (thanks to poor
documents of them that made me worry about the product itself) I tried
all of them, and it turns out not everything works out of the box.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Sensitivity analysis for aggregated data
    ... I am trying to perform a sensitivity analysis on some data that is ... How can I use the lifetime of each battery bank ... The output Y of an individual widget may be ... The inputs to each individual widget are a vector [x1 x2 ... ...
    (sci.stat.math)
  • Re: How to create some text widgets like text editor in VC++?
    ... I am not sure what you mean by the "notebook widget", ... This will instruct to resize its child widgets that you ... the window gets resized. ...
    (comp.lang.tcl)
  • Re: BWidget: PagesManager/Notebook ... pages vs initial state
    ... which constitutes the primal state of the widget. ... does the splash need to be part of the Notebook / PagesManager, ... Here, a ready made UI is provided to control the page state (i.e., the ... tab (at least no notebook widget I'm aware of). ...
    (comp.lang.tcl)
  • Re: What widget do I need?
    ... I can't find such a widget in the standard ... Tk distribution. ... However Rob Seegel made Tk::JComboBox: ...
    (comp.lang.perl.tk)