Hmmm... OK, I think it's time to let Windows i386 rest in peace... so yes, let's require Tcl/TK 8.6 or up.
cheers Miller
On 1/21/25 3:54 PM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
hi,
TL;DR could we bump the minimum TclTk version to 8.6 (for consistencies sake)?
i wonder whether we could agree on a minimum Tcl/Tk version that Pd-GUI code has to be compatible with. The actual value does not matter so much, but whenever I write TclTk code, i would like to know which feature set I can actually use (and whether I actually do need to provide compat code for features that have been in a TclTk-version released 18 years ago)
so i did a quick check to see which TclTk versions are actually shipped in the binary packages on miller's site.
for the Pd-0.55-2 release the TclTk versions are:
- Windows/i386: 8.5.19
- Windows/amd64: 8.6.10
- macOS/amd64+arm64: 8.6.13
- (no linux binaries; i think virtually all linux distributions ship
TclTk-8.6 these days, with TclTk-9.0 arriving)
those are just the mainstream architectures. there are also:
- OSX/ppc: 8.4.7
- OSX/i386: 8.5.19
However, the last OSX/ppc package on miller's page is Pd-0.51-0, and the last OSX/i386 package is Pd-0.53-1.
(a more detailed report on which TclTk version is used for which Pd download, can be found at https://zmoelnig.iem.sh/post/tclpd/
Is it correct to assume, that there is no longer any demand for OSX/ppc and OSX/i386 binaries, and therefore nobody will go into the trouble and build a newer version of Pd for these platforms?
If so, we can simply assume that any modern Pd will at least have TclTk-8.5 available.
Since then there's only a single platform left that actually uses TclTk-8.5 (that is: Windows/i386), I would like to suggest to bump it to TclTk-8.6 and thus use the same version for all systems¹.
(I know that TclTk-9.0 cannot be build for any OSX-system that supports i386; i'm pretty sure that we cannot build Tcl-8.6 on PPC and probably not on i386 either)
I guess I could do a PR to update the msw/pdprototype.tgz.
but during my survey I noticed that the Windows packages available on miller's website actually do not use the pdprototype.tgz at all but instead ship with a TclTk that was built locally on miller's linux box...
mgfasdr IOhannes
¹ of course there is now TclTk-9.x! but we probably should wait first until the major bugs got fixed, both on the TclTk side and on the Pd-GUI side :-)
pd-dev@lists.iem.at - the Pd developers' mailinglist https://lists.iem.at/hyperkitty/list/pd-dev@lists.iem.at/message/TVBBBKUZGXX...