install prefix

Jordan K. Hubbard jkh at brierdr.com
Wed Mar 28 16:09:29 PDT 2007


On Mar 28, 2007, at 11:12 AM, George Georgalis wrote:

> why does it use the system-supplied Tcl interpreter,
> vs MacPorts tcl package which is in the domain of
> MacPorts control??? Isn't MacPorts planing on being
> cross platform?  (BTW, it was on about my third port
> that tcl @8.4.14_0 was installed as a dependency.)

Because MacPorts is itself written in Tcl, so you'd have a bit of a  
bootstrapping problem if you had to build and install Tcl from  
macports before you could use macports.

Sure, it could probably be worked around by having some set of binary  
tcl distributions to start from, but since Tcl is well-supported by  
the system, why go to all the extra trouble?

Also, MacPorts isn't really planning on being cross-platform so much  
anymore.  There were some early experiments with this, and no one is  
deliberately trying to stop people from using it on, say, Linux or  
FreeBSD, but no work has really gone into this area either and many  
many ports just assume they're running on a Mac (not even "vanilla  
Darwin" is supported anymore).

- Jordan

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