Re: ANNOUNCE: Scotty-2.1.0 based on Tcl7.5/Tk4.1

Juergen Schoenwaelder (schoenw@cs.utwente.nl)
Wed, 12 Jun 1996 00:04:55 +0200

Buz Owen <ado@bbn.com> wrote:

> I had to make the following changes to (the unix) Makefile to successfully
> install scotty2.1.0 and tkined1.4.0. This looks to me like a bug in
> Makefile.in.

No, it is not a bug. I think that it is a bad style to touch the Tcl
installation directory during the automated installation process of a
Tcl extension. This can create all sort of problems (e.g. when another
extension just puts its own version of pkgIndex.tcl into the Tcl
installation directory). I think that Tcl should have a mechanism to
locate packages automatically. I posted an article on this issue a few
weeks ago to comp.lang.tcl. Lets hope that the Sun people will fix
this in the next Tcl release.

The README file in the unix directory of the scotty extension contains
a note how to tell Tcl to pick up the pkgIndex.tcl files automatically:

>(f) Scotty and tkined installs as a dynamic loadable module. You have to
> make sure that the Tcl interpreter is able to find the modules on
> your system. There are two ways to achieve this goal:
>
> 1. You can use the Tcl environment variable TCLLIBPATH by setting
> it to the installation directories of the scotty and the tkined
> extension, e.g.
>
> TCLLIBPATH="/usr/local/lib/tnm2.1.0 /usr/local/lib/tkined1.4.0"
>
> 2. You can edit the Tcl initialization file init.tcl usually found
> as /usr/local/lib/tcl7.5/init.tcl and append the scotty and tkined
> directories to the Tcl auto_path variable, e.g.
>
> lappend auto_path /usr/local/lib/tnm2.1.0
> lappend auto_path /usr/local/lib/tkined1.4.0
>
> The first solution is useful for testing and playing with the scotty
> extension. If you are going to use scotty regularly and if there
> are multiple users who will be using scotty, the second version
> might be easier to use and administrate.

Hope this helps to solve this installation problem,
Juergen