Perl Tk and MacOS X

[rah]

Anyone had any luck getting Perl/Tk to build under MacOS X?

I 've found many threads with tips on how to build. Even one from the original developer that said he had found the problem, but no indication of when/if it might be fixed. I've tried all the suggestions found without success. Any ideas?

TIA,
-rah

[rob_au]

While not an immediate solution to your question, I might direct you to have a look at an alternate GUI development tool for Perl which works quite well with MacOS - wxPerl, a wrapper for the wxWindows GUI toolkit.

This toolkit has gathered a great deal of support of late and a number of resources exist for its usage including:

• http://wxperl.sourceforge.net/
• http://www.wxwindows.org/
• http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/09/12/wxtutorial1.html
• http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=112297
• http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=112816
• http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=122227

 

[Steve_p]

From what I heard last, Tk is not a priority for Apple to get running. The problem is that they would have to support two Tks: one for X and one for Cocoa. There is a lot of complaints in the Python community regarding this as well. I might add, however, that the X Windows versions of Tk apparently work, so if you don't mind work with XonX, you can get it to work.

[jonknee]

When I asked this same question a few months ago I was pointed to Camel Bones. It allows you to make Aqua programs in Perl! It seems pretty neat but I was never able to get anything to compile (others on this site have however). Good luck! -Jonathan Gales

[Elian]

There are some interesting issues with CamelBones apps. You basically have to build them about three or four times in a row before things are properly compiled. Dunno why, but that's the way it works at the moment.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Apple actually is (slowly) supporting the creation of an Aqua Tk.
Somebody needs to write a perl interface for it...

[rah]

Thanks all for the suggestions, but I really want "X" Tk, not Aqua or CamelBones, etc. We just had a thread recently, where many espoused the virtues of OS X as a perl development platform. Here's a case where I'd like to be able to use OS X to develop perl Tk I will deploy on UNIX, but can't. Building an Aqua GUI brings me no closer to my goal.

The Darwin development community has done a great job bringing "X" to OS X. Rootless X works great. There are nice Window Managers available. I thought this would be a realtively straight forward build with a fully functional X-windows install, but my attempts to build Perl Tk look like they failed for realtively simple reasons (looked like a recursion in an atempt to link a shared library). I can't find it. Apparently I am simpler than the bug. The author acknowledged the problem and said a fix would come out, but no sign. I was hoping someone here may have figured a way around this problem.