Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:19:32 +0100 From: Martin Matuska <martin@matuska.org> To: Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen@math.missouri.edu> Cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why so many tcl's and tk's Message-ID: <45F7E854.4090609@matuska.org> In-Reply-To: <45F71306.8040306@math.missouri.edu> References: <45F71306.8040306@math.missouri.edu>
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Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote / napísal(a): > Are the different versions of tcl and tk really not backwards > compatible with earlier versions? I can guess that there have been > heated conversations about this, but a my look at the mailing list > archives didn't give me anything. But it sure would be much nicer if > there was just a tcl and a tcl-devel port or something like that. Are > there really applications that need tcl83 but break on tcl84? > > Stephen > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" The various Tcl and Tk versions do have incompatible changes in the interfaces and in the command syntax. It is very much like Berkeley DB - you have several versions, too. You have to rewrite your program to support more (or newer) Tcl versions. The idea on the current implementation in the FreeBSD ports tree is to stay compatible with older tcl scripts and libraries, too. But the structure of the supporting bsd.tcl.mk is very old and does not suit the needs of current applications anymore. Another recent issue is the handling of threaded and non-threaded versions of Tcl 8.4 and 8.5. The current implementation ist just a workaround, so that applications that explicitly require a threaded Tcl build can use it. A threaded Tcl build is 100% compatible to a non-threaded Tcl. As far as I know, threaded Tcl 8.4 builds and runs on all common FreeBSD architectures. A very clean and good solution would to have a threaded Tcl only. I will test this against all libraries from the FreeBSD ports that extend Tcl to check if they work with the threaded version correctly. I am working with miwi@ on a new implementation of bsd.tcl.mk A first working version can be viewed under: http://www.matuska.org/martin/cgi/viewvc.cgi/ports/Mk/bsd.tcl.mk The final version will probably be different - the threading part might be removed completely in favour of using threaded tcl by default.
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