test_tkinter failing on MacOS

[smontanaro]

Bug report

Bug description:

test_tkinter is failing on MacOS (Sequoia 15.2, M1 MacBook Pro, in my case). It was working fine yesterday, so without delving into this too deeply, I'm going to suggest this change overnight broke things. See attached log

commit da8825ea95a7096bb4f933d33b212a94ade10f6e
Author: Zhikang Yan <2951256653@qq.com>
Date:   Mon Jan 13 23:54:46 2025 +0800

    gh-128562: Fix generation of the tkinter widget names (GH-128604)
    
    There were possible conflicts if the widget class name ends with a digit.

@Xiaokang2022

(FWIW, test_ttk is failing for me on 3.13, but not main. It appears to be a different problem.)

test_tkinter.log

CPython versions tested on:

CPython main branch, 3.13

Operating systems tested on:

macOS

Linked PRs

• gh-128846: Add check_tk_version function to test.support #128880

[zanieb]

The referenced commit is from #128604 / #128562

[zanieb]

I can reproduce this on main / f7ceb31 but reverting da8825e does not resolve the failure.

[zanieb]

I also reproduced this on an arbitrary older commit 2fcdc84 (and then b2ac70a)

If I go back to ce740d4, which I need to run the GUI tests on my machine, I get a bunch of failures — including what looks like the failures reported here. @smontanaro I don't know if it makes sense that these tests worked yesterday.

[zanieb]

It looks like this is caused by using tk 9.0+, at least on my machine, Brew upgraded to a new version.

You can confirm with

❯ ./python.exe -c 'import tkinter; tcl = tkinter.Tcl(); print(tcl.call("info", "patchlevel"))'
9.0.1

In which case, this is part of

• Update tkinter to use Tk 8.6.15 or (better) Tk 9.0 #124111
• Prepare tkinter for tcl 8.7/9.0 and tk 8.7 #104568

I don't think the tests are expected to pass with tk 9 yet.

[smontanaro]

Hmmm... This might turn out to be pilot error. I have a config file in my personal build environment which gets Tcl/Tk libs from my Conda env:

TCLTK_CFLAGS=-I/Users/skip/miniconda3/envs/python312/include
TCLTK_LIBS='-L/Users/skip/miniconda3/envs/python312/lib -Wl,-rpath,/Users/skip/miniconda3/envs/python312/lib -ltk8.6 -ltkstub8.6 -ltcl8.6 -ltclstub8.6'

Somehow that was dropped from a command recalled from my bash history, so I was picking up 9.0.1. Now that I've corrected my commands, my build on main works and yields the expected version:

% ./python.exe -c 'import tkinter; tcl = tkinter.Tcl(); print(tcl.call("info", "patchlevel"))'
8.6.13

I've yet to pull in the correct command on my 3.13 Terminal window, so it still yields the later version:

% ./python.exe -c 'import tkinter; tcl = tkinter.Tcl(); print(tcl.call("info", "patchlevel"))'
9.0.1

Would it be worthwhile running this bit of code in the test suite, then skipping the tests if Tcl/Tk v9 was found?

[zanieb]

That seems reasonable to me, but I'd be curious to hear from someone that's a stakeholder for that topic.

[sobolevn]

cc @terryjreedy

[Xiaokang2022]

This doesn't seem to be the cause of my commit, which passed macOS-related tests.

[terryjreedy]

@serhiy-storchaka is the tkinter expert, not me. I would like to be able to use 9.0, but I don't know where that stands now.