Re: [MACTCL] Loading extensions under Tk on Macintosh

[Daniel A. S. <st...@ic...>]

Michael,

the following setup works for me: (on a HFS+ filesystem)

use the _shared_ tclkit build from 
http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~steffen/tcltk/tclkit/tclkit_shared.sit.bin

and put snack.shlb into e.g. a subdirectory called lib

then execute

	set auto_path [concat [list [file join [pwd] lib]] $auto_path]
	package require snack

You may want to take a look at the mac distribution of Emu 
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/emu/) where I use something similar 
(without tclkit) to load snack and other extensions from a local 
directory. (esp. look at the resources of the executables)

For mac package loading to work off a CD, I suspect you need resource 
forks on the cd (shared libraries on the mac need a 'cfrg' resource 
so that they can be loaded, and mac Tcl extensions require a TEXT 
resource with the pkgIndex).
AFAIK e.g. Toast for Mac can write hybrid CD's with HFS+, ISO, Joliet 
and Rockridge filesystems all on one CD; this may allow you to get 
resource forks onto the cd, as long as you master the cd on the mac.

there may be a way around the resource fork requirement; IIRC, the 
code in tclMacLoad.c will try to load the complete datafork of a file 
as a PPC fragment if no 'cfrg' resource can be found, and a 
traditional pkgindex.tcl file should work with that (via [load]), but 
I have never tried this.
The resource fork obstacle is also the main reason why dynamic 
library loading from vfs in tclkit doesn't work on the mac currently.

Also note that [info script] used to have a bug on the mac that could 
have an impact here, I had a look at it some time back and thought I 
had fixed it, but that may have been post 8-3-4

on the mac, instead of using [info script], it may be easier to embed 
a tclkitrc resource in tclkit that sets the auto_path relative to 
[pwd] (which defaults to the executable's directory at startup) and 
then sources your main.tcl

Cheers,

Daniel

-- 
** Daniel A. Steffen          **  "And now to something completely
** Department of Mathematics  **   different"    Monty Python
** Macquarie University       ** <mailto:st...@ma...>
** NSW 2109 Australia         ** <http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~steffen/>