
Tue Oct 10 16:46:11 CDT 2000

Well, after about 6 hours of hacking at Tcl/Tk, I have a thing that works!

It's GPL'd, etc.

To use: change the location of "wish" at the top of mtxctl.tk, change
variables for things like the location of mtx on you system, and run it.
It requires wish 8.0 or greater.

It can do some neat stuff, all the menus are pretty self-explanitory (I think),
just try things and see what happens.

Known issues:
1) The layout kind of sucks.  It's fine for my library (7 tapes, 1 drive),
   but it will take up all kinds of nasty screen real estate with a big tape
   library, i.e. you'll have a windows that's a vertical stack of n buttons,
	 where n=(# of tapes)+(# of drives).  you can see how that would suck for a
	 big library.
2) it would be great if the status output stuff I have in for when mtx is 
   actually doing stuff would work (i.e. where the buttons are supposed to 
	 say "working..."), but it doesn't.  I think it's a stupid Tk issue.  If
	 anyone knows how to fix it, please tell me.
	 notes 11 oct 2000: I've noticed that the basic problem is that the 
	 interpreter hangs up when it's exec'ing something, so even though
	 button text should be changing, it doesn't because the interpreter
	 is stuck.  for example, putting "puts" commands in to test event reciept,
	 etc works, but the windows don't actually reconfigure.  argh.  there's
	 got to be a way around this, but what it is is beyond me for the moment...
3) I have no idea if it will work with more then one tape drive.  Well, it 
   will in principle, but the "mtx status" output parsing probably needs
   work before it will actually recognize the second drive.  if you look
   at the code you'll see what I mean.  update: I think it will work now.
	 made some regex changes that should do the trick, but I still have
	 no way to test it.

update 11 oct 2000: it now recognizes right mouse clicks on the buttons.

Dan Wright
xy@evilblobbie.com
