Macports Tcl

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jul 6, 2013, at 17:50, Mark Anderson wrote:

> I'm starting to wonder if we should include a bootstrapping version of Tcl with Macports, in case some future version of OSX ships with a broken version. Any thoughts?

Yes, that topic recently came up. Someone pointed out that Tcl 8.6 offers improvements that would allow us to simplify or streamline some currently convoluted code in base.

There have been buggy versions of Tcl shipped with OS X in the past. For example Tcl 8.5 in Leopard has a bug where unsetting environment variables doesn't work, which caused an endless variety of errors that were very difficult to track down and which therefore took months for someone to realize what was happening. MacPorts base currently includes code to work around that problem.

We also currently use the system versions of cURL and Subversion, which on older OS X versions are missing some features.

MacPorts currently does not ship with any libraries. If we wanted to change that, we would have to think about how to do that.