[Starkit] Re: dqkit

[Wojciech Kocjan]

Hafer wrote:
> The dqkit is very nice and is almost exactly what I have been looking for.  I 
> have wanted to create a Windows tclkit.exe that contained BLT.  However, dqkit 
> contains many other packages that I do not need making the .exe larger than I 
> would like it to be. So....

BTW now the project is available at 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dqsoftware

Understandable. dqkit-Win32-i386-all.exe has many extensions, since I 
wanted to have a binary that has everything our company ever uses/used. 
It is too big (2MB) for most smaller projects.

> Instead of just asking someone to create a tclkit.exe with the BLT package 
> included in it (unless this has already been done and is posted somewhere).  I 
> would like to learn how to create it. I am very new to this so I am a little 
> overwhelmed.  I have read the info on the wiki.tcl.tk page but I can't seem to 
> follow some of it.

Ok, assuming that you have similar Windows configuration to mine (that 
is cygwin and mingw, mingw set in PATH before cygwin), and tcl 8.4 (I 
have activetcl 8.4.5.0), building a custom dqkit is just as easy as:

cd V:/dqkit
tclsh gen/buildkit build -tk -blt -resfile=current -binary=custom

It should build something with name bin/$host/dqkit-custom.exe :-)

Cygwin can be set up from many FTP sites - just download setup.exe and 
follow instructions. Be sure to overwrite bin/bash.exe as bin/sh.exe, 
since otherwise I've noticed that some scripts may fail.

Be sure to also install upx, since it is needed to compress the binary 
before adding the vfs libraries - 
http://upx.sourceforge.net/download/upx124w.zip should prove helpful.

MingW can be downloaded from www.mingw.org. However, I have put my mingw 
snapshot at dqsoftware project on sourceforge, so you can just download 
the zip from there.

> I have never compiled the Tcl core or any other packages I have always just 
> used what was available to me.  I have used tclkit.exe and the sdx utility to
> qwrap, unwrap and wrap myapp.exe so I am not completely new to the tclkit 
> ideas.  

Using tclkit and compiling it are two different things. I used tclpro 
and freewrap for years before I managed to compile (without failing :-)

> I just would like to learn the steps of how to create a tclkit.exe that is 
> exactly the same as the tclkit-win32.upx.exe located here 
> http://www.equi4.com/pub/tk/ but with the BLT package included also. 

That's impossible with tclkit, but with dqkit. The main difference is 
that dqkit does not allow changing icons the way sdx can do. The only way

> I realize that the BLT package is not like some other Tcl extension packages 
> because it is not stubs enabled but I still would like to learn more about 
> tclkits.

Yes, BLT is very painful to use. Also note that I'm using blt 3.0 from 
the CVS (although it seems to work the same as 2.4z :-).

-- 
WK