Re: Problem building scotty 2.1.0

Juergen Schoenwaelder (schoenw@cs.utwente.nl)
Wed, 26 Jun 1996 18:15:16 +0200

woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods) wrote:

> It really irks me when I have to set an environment variable to tell an
> application where it has been installed. I told it once, and I don't
> want to have to tell it again, esp. not every time I run the
> program.

You can edit the init.tcl file of your Tcl installation as described
in the unix/README file if you prefer this solution.

> Certainly setting auto_path in scotty.c and in the tkined script with
> the configured installation pathnames works very well and eliminates the
> need for the average user of the out-of-the-box scotty and tkined
> packages to set TCLLIBPATH. I'm happy! ;-)

There are two problems: You have to edit *every* script file that uses
a package and this makes script files not portable. IMHO, this kills
the concept of packages completely.

Once again, Tcl must have a way to find packages automatically. I
already proposed to make Tcl smart enough to locate packages in
$(exec_prefix)/lib automatically by assuming a naming convention
(actually the way the tnm and tkined packages are installed). This is
easy to implement, allows a package writer all sorts of freedom how a
package loads and initializes itself and does not require to play
dirty tricks with init.tcl. I really hope that the Tcl guys pick up
such a solution. (BTW, I nearly spend a week playing with different
installation schemes and you will have a hard time to convince me of a
better way. :-)

Juergen