Re: guicom - report

[Fred Proctor <proctor-at-cme.nist.gov>]

GUI Committee,

Great job with the GUIs. I put the latest backplotter, tkemc, and
genedit versions into the 29-Feb-2000 distribution. When you get
improvements send them to me or drop them in the dropbox and send email
and I'll make sure they persist.

Note that I made some changed to tkemc.tcl, namely:

1. pulling out the hard-coded "linux_2_0_36" strings and replacing them
with "UNKNOWN_PLAT", which is replaced with the correct plat by the
Makefile.

2. pulling out the procedures for popping up the calibration and testing
windows, and making them separate files (emccalib.tcl, emctesting.tcl)
that are sourced into tkemc.tcl. This will allow others (me, for
example), to edit these scripts separately from the main TkEmc window
source.

One thing that can be done is to build a menu that gives access to any
.tcl script, so that custom ones can be put in a directory somewhere and
will appear by name under a menu, say "Scripts". This will allow people
to code up smaller scripts and drop them into the dropbox, which
everyone can put in the script directory and then have them appear by
name in the menu without having to modify tkemc.tcl. I don't know if
this will be very useful, but the Tcl/Tk code for this is:

set scriptdir /usr/local/emc/scripts
set files [exec /bin/ls $scriptdir]
foreach file $files {
# make sure 'menu' is defined already
  if {[string match *.tcl $file]} {
  $menu add command -label $file -command "exec $scriptdir/$file &"
  }
}

Note that we had problems with the Linux 2.2 port and Tcl/Tk. tkemc and
the backplotter ran erratically, when any RT controller modules were
loaded. It looks like the RT timer code messes with the Linux timer, and
affects the "after" command in the scripts. I'm going to test this more.
When we ran xemc, it was OK.

--Fred