Re: is tcl/tk dying out?!

Peter Dalgaard schrieb:
Neil Madden <nem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Peter Dalgaard wrote:
[...]
ActiveTcl, for all its virtues, is a single-platform proprietary item.
What do you mean by this? ActiveTcl is available on 6 different
platforms, as far as I can see (AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris,
and Windows according to
http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActiveTcl/?mp=1). I use it on 3 of
those myself.

Yes, should have checked that. However, the point was never that it is
not available, but that it is not what e.g. a standard Fedora or SuSE
user will have in hand.

Standard Fedora or SUSE user..., if you add Debian in it gets absurd.
The main thing you have with a standard user is inconsistency.

Ok, if someone packaged up an app or deb as an rpm for a specific
distribution i may be lucky that it works. This is usually the case for
most apps included with the distribution, but not always.
(example: Eclipse fails miserably on SUSE 10.1 x86_64 because the
java-gtk binding is only provided as a 32-bit version...).

Unless you run exactly the distro your building packages for, your
doomed for failure, due to the non-stable glibc and kernel apis on
Linux. Try building anything that works on a redhat 5.x to Fedora Core 4
System without recompile.

Or try to get a decent Firefox for a Pentium I System on Linux, fun
stuff, need to recompile everything.

Tcl has the benefit that it is easier to ship your custom Tcl install
without the need for system wide installation files and things, then
with other langs.

What it provides is not usable under e.g. Linux, or even on Windows if
you want to bundle Tcl/Tk with other software.

Again, what do you mean by "not usable under ... Linux"? I use
ActiveTcl under Linux almost daily. ActiveTcl is an effective
"batteries included" distribution for end-users.

I meant that you cannot assume that it is there.
Right. But thats a similar situation for many other packages. I'myself
find me currently cursing distributors that they missed package x or y,
which is absolutley critical, or that they bundled only the static lib
or only the dynamic lib or an old version or whatever.

Bundling/redistribution is a separate issue.

No. It's _the_ _reason_ you cannot assume the presence of ActiveTcl.
ActiveTcl is something that you need to tell the end-user to go
download (and install and maintain by nonstandard methods, as far as I
can tell). On Windows, this is just "business as usual" - you also
need to tell people where to get a C compiler, perl, emacs, younameit,
but on the modern Unix-alikes things are usually done differently.

As i said above, the shrink wrap approach on modern unix-alikes does not
work (apart from OS X, where it might work). Take a look at distrowatch,
it list more than a thousand Linux distributions, each with its own
little differences in packaging guidelines, package locations and so on.
Add the BSD's and other OSs to the picture and things don't get
brighter. Not even the widely used rpm is maintained, SUSE and Redhat
are working from private, diverging forks of the code base.

So if you want complete Tcl package covering in many more distros just
start packaging things up:

For SUSE start with the Build Service:
http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service

For Debian enlist you self to the new tcltk-pkg team:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-tcltk-devel

I'm sure others could add the appropriate places for the distro of your
choice.

Its not an impossible task for the extensions following the TEA build
system, as Daniel Steffen demonstrated with his Apple OS X bundling of
Tcl/Tk and comments from Jeff Hobbs indicate similar things for
ActiveTcl, but its work to be done. And work that has to be done again
for each new distro release, each new extension release. Most Tcl
extensions are actually quite easy to build (there are exceptions of
cause, lots of em, as always).

Maybe I'm ranting a bit too much, but blaming ActiveTcl for faults of
Linux distributors is a bit of mark.

Michael

P.S. I personally think Reinhard Max does a great job for SUSE,
packaging Tcl, although i would like to have mysqltcl and xotcl and dict
added to the list of available packages.


.

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