[Xotcl] Tcl source requirement

[Gustaf Neumann]

On Sunday 02 March 2003 11:15, Kristoffer Lawson wrote:
> Is there any particular reason why XOTcl still requires the Tcl source
> lying around to compile? Generally I find it awkward and not quite "clean"
> that some Tcl extensions require the original Tcl source and I've never
> really needed it myself for my own stuff.

 Dear Kristoffer,

 there is a short answer and a very long answer to your 
 question. XOTcl needs the Tcl-source since it contains
 several .h files that are not included in typical binary
 distributions. Such files are tclInt.h or tclCompile.h.
 The first one is sneeking into more distributions 
 (a student told me that his SuSE distro includes tclInt.h),
 tclCompile.h was just needed for speed (1.0.2 has
 a better configure script that checks automatically this file).

 The long answer where i am not going into details is, why
 des XOTcl need tclInt.h. In short, XOTcl needs it because
 its needs access to internal of several tcl structures that
 are not public available. Examples are the structures
 Command, Namespace, Interp. Certainly it will be possible
 to define access functions to access the relevant info,
 and we could try to push these into the tcl-source development,
 but we have not started this effort jet. Just comment out
 the include statement of tclInt.h, and you will see how many
 places are involved. We have on our informal todo-list
 a step where we define access macros fort the relevant
 infos, but this is currently not top priority. I agree certainly
 that it would be much nicer to get rid of tclInt.h.

 best regards
-gusaf


-- 
Univ.Prof. Dr.Gustaf Neumann
Abteilung für Wirtschaftsinformatik
WU-Wien, Augasse 2-6, 1090 Wien