[Xcircuit-dev] RE: XCircuit on Cygwin

[R. Timothy Edwards]

Dear Bert,

> Configure failed for me on cygwin.  I got a message, "Can't find tcl
> library in".

> I determined that the library name is "libtcl84.a" and configure was
> looking for "libtcl8.4.a"

Yes, but the issues go much, much deeper than this.  I rewrote the whole
page for magic-for-windows (which is also Tcl-based, much the same way
as XCircuit) because of changes made to Cygwin in the past year or so.
I tried compiling the Tcl version, but it was like banging my head
against a brick wall.  It is clear that 1) the Tcl/Tk that comes with
the Cygwin distribution was (believe it or not) *not* compiled under
Cygwin, but compiled using a cross-compiler.  It works very well
except that it uses native Windows graphics, so you can't load into it
a package like XCircuit that is based on X11.  2) Tcl/Tk can be
compiled from source to run on Cygwin under X11, but since I had to
hack the makefile to get it to compile, it's clearly not well-supported.
Even when compiled, it is missing one important feature:  the ability
to load DLL object files (under UNIX/Linux this is a system function
called "dlopen").  So I can either get a version that can load xcircuit
but can't run it, or I can get a version that can run xcircuit but
can't load it.

By the way, the "libtcl84.a" comes from the cross-compiled version,
and the "libtcl8.4.a" is produced when you compile Tcl from source.
I left the latter version in, because I thought that the version
compiled from source was closer to a workable solution.

For now, the only way to compile xcircuit under Cygwin is to use
"./configure --without-tcl".  I shall revise the source so that
without-tcl is the default for Cygwin, until I can figure out how
to get the thing to compile.

Sorry to ignore your patch.  I'm sure it's a perfectly good patch
file. :)

					Regards,
					Tim


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