ouster@allspice.berkeley.EDU (John Ousterhout) (03/14/91)
This is to announce the first official release of the Tk toolkit
for X11. Tk is philosophically similar to Xt, but it is based
around the Tcl language. The use of Tcl simplifies the toolkit
and also provides a great deal of additional power: many
applications can be written as Tcl scripts without writing any C
code at all, and Tcl provides a means for different applications
to communicate with each other. A paper describing Tk appeared
in the Winter '91 USENIX Conference Proceedings, and is also
distributed as part of the release.
The release contains source code and documentation for the
following things:
(1) The Tk toolkit.
(2) The Tcl command language.
(3) A Motif-like widget set.
(4) A simple windowing shell called "wish".
(5) A few demo scripts for wish.
All of the Tk and Tcl stuff is public and free. As far as I'm
concerned, you can do anything you want with it. If you build
applications based on Tk I'd be interested to hear what they are
and how Tk helped or hindered your application(s). If you decide
Tk is a piece of junk, I'd be interested to hear your reasons.
Overall, I'd rate this release as about beta-level in quality: I
hope that the code is pretty stable, but I expect to get a lot of
feedback about missing or undesirable features. There's a complete
set of manual entries but no tutorial-style introduction yet. I hope
that you won't have too much trouble getting started with Tk if you've
had previous experience programming X11.
Some of you may have discovered various pre-release versions of
Tcl over the last few months. The new release supercedes the
pre-release versions and contains a number of bug fixes plus a few
additional features such as the "wm" command for dealing with window
managers.
The release is available for public FTP from sprite.berkeley.edu
(Internet address 128.32.150.27). To retrieve the release, use
anonymous FTP to sprite (user "anonymous", password "guest") and
retrieve the file "tk.tar.Z" with the following set of commands:
type image (try "type binary" if this command is rejected)
get tk.tar.Z
What you'll get is a compressed tar file; to get back the original
directory hierarchy, type the commands
uncompress tk.tar.Z
tar xf tk.tar
This will create a tk subdirectory with all the source files and
documentation. There will be a README file in the subdirectory that
tells how to compile Tk and gives some hints about how to get started
with Tk.
If you can't get access to the release via the Internet, send me e-mail
and I'll try to find some other way to get the release to you (e.g.
1/2" tape or Exabyte-style 8mm videocassette).
I've also set up a mailing list for people interested in exchanging
e-mail about Tcl and Tk. If you're interested in joining the list,
send me an e-mail message.