RE: !! Take note !! CVS frozen !! RE: [Tcllib-devel] Tcllib Release

[Lars <lar...@re...>]

At 02.42 +0200 2005-10-07, Andreas Kupries wrote:
>The Tcllib CVS has been tagged and __ pre-release __ archives have been
>created.
[snip]
>Please give them a whirl.

I currently have some hours to kill in Never-never-land (in an airport
lounge just outside Customs, waiting for a flight that's currently
estimated to be two hours late), so why not do some whirling, indeed? So
far I've mostly been dealing with the installer, but I thought I'd better
start typing things down before I forget...

A first problem I had was that the installer doesn't handle permissions. I
understand it probably can't, but there could be some advice in INSTALL.txt
on how to deal with this. I suspect [exec sudo installer.tcl] doesn't
qualify as good practice. Also it could try to catch the error (for me it
was the [file mkdir tcllib1.8] that failed first) rather than just error
out completely.

Next, I'd like to ask where the log ends up (when running the GUI version).
I got some curious error messages in the documentation-making-phase (for
snit_faq, I think), which however didn't stop the installation. I thought I
could come back to it later, but after installation was complete wish just
exited, and then the information in the log window was no more. (I think
the error said something about a particular string not being a valid return
code in the sv_se locale (???).) [Later, after having browsed the
installer.tcl code a couple of times, I see that the installer indeed just
quits when done. When working in GUI mode, it should first ask the user
whether (s)he wants to save the log window contents. An additional
alternative could be to dump the log window contents to stdout, though.]

Another curious thing is the default locations the installer selects, which
had me confused for quite a while. In my system it wants to place things in
/System/Library, despite /Library being more appropriate (e.g. being where
my wish is located). The logic that appears to be responsible for this is
that libpath is set to the last element of tcl_pkgPath, but is that
appropriate? Looking at how my tcl_pkgPath is constructed, it mostly goes
from specific (e.g. user-installed packages) to general (those provided by
the OS vendor), so the things I install should rather go into some of the
early entries on this path.

Slightly related, but not having any ill effects for me, is the way in
which the test for a starkit is being performed. It tests whether [info
nameofexecutable] is a prefix of [info library], but it appears to me as
the test may miss some cases where this happens. The reason is that I find
my [info nameofexecutable] is the non-normalized
/usr/bin/../../Library/Frameworks/Tk.framework/Versions/8.4/Resources/Wish
Shell.app/Contents/MacOS/Wish Shell
whereas the [info library] is normalized to
/Library/Frameworks/Tcl.framework/Versions/8.4/Resources/Scripts
Perhaps starkits don't normalize their library paths, or perhaps they do,
but one should anyway take note of this possibility for errors.

Not much actual testing got done, but OTOH these delayed remarks could be
useful in a slightly longer timeframe.

Lars Hellstr=F6m,
now safely home (after far too many hours waiting in airports this weekend;
aarrrrgh)