Stubsification of Expect

Purpose: to discuss the strategy to move forward in implementing Expect support for the Tcl Stubs standard library support.


[ stubs ; Expect ]


stevel ... I beg to differ. In May 2000 I stubified expect 5.31.7 (with some assistance from Dave Engel) so that I could dynamically load expect as a package within a scripted document.

I also submitted the patch to the old Scriptics CVS repository (id 923) and the notification was automatically posted to comp.lang.tcl.

If anyone is interested, the modified files are at http://www.digital-smarties.com/pub/expect-bits.tar.gz and the original versions are in http://www.digital-smarties.com/pub/expect.tar.gz (I really should turn these into a patch).

I've since made the patches available to David Gravereaux who is looking at the Expect NT port.

If anyone is interested, I can make available builds for Linux and Solaris Sparc.


Steve has also passed his work on to Don, tclguy and Clif.

This is a big issue for anyone using TclKit, Starkit, ...


"Anyway, the expect 5.31 source and the modified files are under http://www.digital-smarties.com/pub

  • expect.tar.gz
  • expect-bits.tar.gz

The expect-bits.tar.gz files aren't diffs (I never got round to it) but the changes are minimal. I haven't tested this using a recent tclkit/ starkit ... but it has been working for two years in production scripted documents."


So, since Expect is a SourceForge project, will anyone be stepping forward to upgrade the CVS repository of source to Stubs? And perhaps TEA2 as well?

AK: The CVS head of Expect is stubsified in the sense of being aware of the Tcl stub-table. It does not export its own stub-table. Nor is it TEA2. [Is this as of, say, May 2003?]

AK: No, as of Tcl Dev Kit 2.5., i.e. February 2003.

LV: What are the starkit implications of this state - can Expect be put loaded from a starkit?

stevel: Yes - definitely


Category Expect