[Starkit] filleting tcllib

[Steve Blinkhorn]

jcw wrote:
> 
> Arjen Markus wrote:
> 
> > Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
> >
> >> Has anyone given any thought to a method for filleting tcllib, i.e.
> >> specifying a list of packages known to be required, [...]
> >
> > Most of the time I only need one or two packages and figuring out
> > which to include has been relatively simple sofar.
> >
> > Perhaps rather than a programmatic solution, we should provide
> > a chart depicting which packages are required by which others?
> 
> A simple text file which contains all "A depends on B" dependencies  
> as a Tcl-readable text file, say as "A B\n" lines could go a long way.
> 
> Could add a third item perhaps, for cases where dependencies are  
> platform-specific or depend on the presence of other packages.  Easy  
> to ignore for simple-minded uses of this datafile.
> 
> I'd vote for having such a text file included in the tcllib distro,  
> then anyone can come up with whatever automation scripts they like.   
> Let's make a start with dependency-awareness in the world of Tcl  
> packages, without it we'll never reach any sort of repository solution!
> 

The trouble with text files is that they need maintaining, and an
out-of-date text file just throws you back to manually working through
the dependencies.   If you think about it, every script in tcllib that
has dependencies has "package require" statements; there is already a
top-level pkgIndex.tcl file which implicitly contains a list of
packages and where they are located; each package has its own
pkgIndex.tcl which details what to source.

But there are some funnies.   autoproxy lives under http - there may
be good sense in that, and it's simple to discover, but some of the
location/dependency combinations are more obscure.   A good script
taking advantage of the facilities of Tcl to walk recursively around
collecting dependencies and putting them together would surely be
prefereable to a manually-maintained text file?



-- 
Steve Blinkhorn <steve at prd.co.uk>