CODEWITHSUNDEEP
tcl
potrzebie
potrzebie

Reputation: 1798

Multiple versions of Tcl

Are there any particular things to think about when building and installing (globally) a new version of Tcl from source, besides relinking /usr/local/bin/tclsh and wish to the new versions?

I know that the interpreter executables tclsh and wish are installed with different names, but what about the include and library files? When I build eggdrop, will it link with the latest version? How about the man pages - are the old ones overwritten by the new ones?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1719

Answers (2)

kostix
kostix

Reputation: 55443

The usual approach for this case is to configure the build so that it's installed under a single directory (the Windows approach), say, under /opt/tcltk/8.6. You're then guaranteed against clashes with other versions and deinstallation is a matter of running rm -rf on that single directory. This approach has its downsides though:

  • You'll have to link (some) installed third-party Tcl libraries under your new hierarchy. This is because Tcl derives the set of paths to look for libraries from its own location.
  • /opt/tcltk/8.6/bin won't be listed in $PATH.

With certain OSes, another (possibly more sensible) approach is to do a "backport", that is, to take the source package of the required Tcl/Tk version and make it build for the installed version of the OS; then install the resulting packages in a normal way. On systems where various versions of Tcl/Tk are co-installable (for instance, Debian and its derivatives), this possibly provides the most sensible solution.

As to manual pages in the latter case, in Debian, they just end up being packaged in a separate package, installation of which is not required; so you just select one of the available documentation packages and install it.

Upvotes: 1

Donal Fellows
Donal Fellows

Reputation: 137567

In terms of having multiple versions present, this is a normal thing to do (do this by setting the --prefix option to configure when building) and has been so for quite a while. You'll probably want to avoid having multiple patchlevels of a single version if you can, but having, say, 8.4, 8.5 and 8.6 co-installed is entirely OK. You'll want to have the different installations in different directories too, and you're right about linking the unversioned tclsh name to the one you want normally (though I just use the versioned executable name instead).

The only way to have the manpages coexist nicely is to have them installed in separate directory trees and to update the MANPATH environment variable to point to the right one (unless you've got a man executable that will take paths to manpages directly — some do, some don't — and that is hardly as convenient). If you can bear being online, we've got official HTML builds of the documentation hosted at http://www.tcl.tk/man/ which includes all significant versions going back quite a long way.

Upvotes: 0

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