John Ellson wrote:
> The 'restricted auto_path' patch that we are adding will
limit the
> search to %{_libdir}/tcl8.5 and %{_datadir}/tcl8.5. This greatly
> improves the startup time for most Tcl applications. However, it does
> require that maintainers of Tcl extension packages make some changes to
> ensure that the extensions get installed into %{_libdir}/tcl8.5 (or
> %{_datadir}/tcl8.5) instead of %{_libdir} (or %{_datadir}). I will be
> happy to help out any maintainers that want help with this change.
Will this information be available from some kind of introspection from
running tclsh ?
Yes. You can start tclsh and run 'set auto_path'. This will print out
a list of the directories that will be searched for packages.
Has this change been accepted upstream so that it can be relied on
on
other platforms?
I had a discussion with upstream about this, and they blamed the problem
on the distributions installing Tcl and the extensions into too-generic
directories. Unfortunately, most extensions were developed to be
installed directly into /usr/lib and /usr/share, and now need to be
patched to be installed elsewhere.
In any case, you can always look at the contents of the auto_path
variable on any platform in Tcl to see where extensions are looked for.
--Mike