Re: Problem building scotty 2.1.0
Cameron Laird (claird@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM)
Wed, 26 Jun 1996 17:13:04 -0500 (CDT)
From owner-tkined@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de Wed Jun 26 16:13:19 1996
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 96 12:33:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods)
.
.
.
Well, the first and most obvious question to ask would be why script
files need to be "portable" in this sense. Once the application is
Well, they don't need to be "portable"; if they're
not, though, we're suddenly back in a compiled-lan-
guage development environment. I'm entirely
comfortable with that, but it's sure not what most
people think they're getting with Tcl.
configured and installed there should be no reason to keep the scripts
portable. If there's some unsurmountable reason that you can't have a
homogeneous view of the installed packages on every system from which
you might run the script, then so far as I know you can still fall back
on the environment variable hack.
There definitely are insurmountable reasons. Many
of us involved in network management deal with
wildly heterogenous hosts for our processing. Hack-
ing environment variables as would be necessary here
is repugnant; it's not unprecedented, as many appli-
cations require users to tinker with their
environments, but Tcl was never like that before,
and it makes 7.5 *more* difficult to administer than
previous releases. What did packages buy us?
It is also possible to custom install the "client" portion, i.e. the
scripts themselves. They are usually tiny, and I'm sure a simple
procedure could be added to make this relatively painless for folks who
do have wildly divergent workstation environments for whatever reason.
It's true, and that simple procedure deserves to be
part of Tcl itself. Juergen is doing the right thing
by documenting the situation carefully, and urging
the folks at Sun to solve this sensibly.
.
.
.
Cameron Laird
Network Engineered Solutions http://starbase.neosoft.com/~bodi/nesi.html
claird@calladan.com +1 713 763 8366
claird@NeoSoft.com +1 713 996 8546 FAX
Houston WWW Business Guide: http://starbase.neosoft.com/~bodi/HouGuide.html