Re: Tcl extensions for Tcl 8 and 9

Hi, thanks for having a look. On Mon, 6 Jul 2026, Stuart Henderson wrote: > > This with ports/x/y/tcl8 and ports/x/y/tcl9 and various duplication > and fiddling with Makefile.inc feels particularly awkward, especially > when it needs replicating for every Tcl extension port. > > It should be possible to do this with non-conflicting flavours of the > same port, similar to how python ports used to handle py2 + py3. The > difference compared to old python being that with this, one would > need to depend on the other, but I don't think that's a problem. Ok, I think I've got something working. Could you name a port that does/did this that I can use for example? > Most of the mechanism would be common to all Tcl extension ports > so could go in lang/tcl/tcl.port.mk so it's mostly one-time work to > do the setup there, with smaller changes to the individual ports as > they're moved across to it. > > For the files which need to be present in only one of the flavoured > packages, I'd use the SUBST_VARS trick with a variable that defined to > either "@comment " or "" and use that to prefix those files in PLIST so > a single PLIST can be shared between the flavours. Other differences in > PLISTs are mostly going to be formulaic so you'd have e.g. for these Seems I'm successful with that, though I can't guess (yet) what could be factored into tcl.port.mk. > : libxyz123.so, libxyz123.so.0.0 and libxyzstub123.a. > : libtcl9xyz123.so, libtcl9xyz123.so.0.0, and libxyzstub.a. > > you could set this in the tcl-xyz port > > MODTCL_LIBV= 123 > > and in the module, other vars depending on the flavour (tcl8/tcl9), > to either of > > MODTCL_EXTLIB= libtcl9 > MODTCL_STUB= stub.a > > MODTCL_EXTLIB= lib > MODTCL_STUB= stub${MODTCL_LIBV}.a I don't really get this but it doesn't seem as important right now. I figure the right bits will make themselves evident once a few ports have been converted. I wan't too clear about the lib names. Probably not obvious what they mean. Basically two types: loadable-only and loadable/linkable+optional_stub. Loadable libs in ${LOCALBASE}/lib/tcl/xyz Linkable libs in ${LOCALBASE}/lib The default names are: Ver Loadable Linkable Stub Tcl8 libxyz123.so libxyz123.so.0.0 libxyzstub123.a Tcl9 libtcl9xyz123.so libtcl9xyz123.so.0.0 libxyzstub.a I want the Tcl9 stub name to conform: libtcl9xyzstub123.a I do think that the Tcl9 stub lib can be used for both. Until that gets worked-out, I'd like to use this consistent naming. Stu