Dependency or a port on private header files of Tcl

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Aug 12, 2011, at 4:39 AM, Gustaf Neumann wrote:
> 
> The version of the Tcl extension XOTcl included in macports is outdated since many years (the current version of XOTcl is 1.6.6).

The XOTcl port in macports currently doesn't have a maintainer. Ports without someone interested in maintaining them often become somewhat outdated.

> The extension depends on the private header files of Tcl (in particular tclInt.h). A straightforward approach would be to define a variant of the port "tcl" with headers, such one could use e.g.
> 
>    sudo port -f install tcl +header

... except that ports can't depend on variants in other ports, so it won't allow someone to do 'port install XOTcl' and have things work correctly.

> Is there any hope for a "+header" variant for the tcl port in MacPorts?

I don't think that that would actually be a good solution.

> The only other option for XOTcl would be to write a install script for mac os x that determines the tcl version on the fly and fetches via Internet on the fly the needed (and matching) .h files, and copies this in the local install tree.... or to make a special mac-ports release that contains already the .h files for various tcl versions.

Macports should be able to handle this (without you having to do something special upstream). One option would be to create a tcl-privateheader port (or something like that) that would install the tcl private headers. If XOTcl just needs the headers to build, it would probably make sense to have it just download/extract its own copy of tcl and use the headers.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
+========================================================+                        
| *---------------- dluke at geeklair.net ----------------* |                          
| *-------------- http://www.geeklair.net -------------* |                          
+========================================================+                        
|   Opinions expressed are mine and do not necessarily   |                          
|          reflect the opinions of my employer.          |                          
+========================================================+