py-tkinter: Links with whichever tk variant was active at build time

[luillo76]

Unexpected behavior occurs with Python 3.13: the tk port with the +x11 variant opens using Quartz instead of X11.

This issue can be reproduced by running the following code in the Python console:

import tkinter
tkinter.Tk()

Previous Python versions (3.12 and earlier) are not affected.

This is the list of tk-related ports active in my setup:

$ > port echo active | grep tk
py39-matplotlib                @3.9.4_0+tkinter 
py39-tkinter                   @3.9.21_0 
py312-matplotlib               @3.10.0_0+tkinter 
py312-tkinter                  @3.12.8_0 
py313-matplotlib               @3.10.0_0+tkinter 
py313-tkinter                  @3.13.1_0 
tk                             @8.6.16_0+x11 
tk-quartz                      @8.6.16_0 
tk-x11                         @8.6.16_0 
tkdiff                         @4.2_0 

Thank you.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

It depends on which variant of the tk port was active at the time that py313-tkinter was built. If you received a binary of py313-tkinter from our server, it was built with tk +quartz.

To work around the problem, when you have tk installed with the desired variant, rebuild py313-tkinter from source, e.g.:

sudo port install tk +x11
sudo port -ns upgrade --force py313-tkinter

I suspect we will want to change the py-tkinter port to have x11 and quartz variants and to depend directly on the tk-x11 and tk-quartz subports.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to luillo76:

Previous Python versions (3.12 and earlier) are not affected.

They are if they are rebuilt from source.

The separation of tk into tk-x11 and tk-quartz ports happened on January 5. In fact all python versions of py-tkinter were last modified before then, so the binaries we produced on the server still link with /opt/local/lib/libtk8.6.dylib, a symlink pointing to whichever tk library is currently active. So instead of having py-tkinter offer variants, it should be possible to tell it to link with the symlink, probably by using install_name_tool to fix the reference after linking.