Non-commercial product by ActiveState. Originally, a Batteries Included effort to bring together in one binary distribution a variety of Tcl extensions. In the past few months, a transition to a repository model (conceptually similar to CPAN, as used by Perl, or the various Linux distribution package repositories) has occurred.
Binaries are available for AIX, HP-UX, Linux, MacOS X, Windows, and Solaris SPARC and IX-86 .
Anyone have a table comparing what versions of what packages have been in each activetcl release?
There is another ActiveTcl around, this one can be found at ActiveTcl (Frankinet) instead.
Details about the product appear at
For instance, with the recent 8.4.18.x release, you get the Tcl/Tk 8.4.18 core, plus the following extensions:
as well as additional tools such as
As of the 8.5.x releases, you get the Tcl/Tk 8.5.x development code, as well as additional tools such as
You get the rest of the extensions you want/need by use of teacup.
escargo 19 Sep 2007 - I just saw a notice about ActiveState 8.4.15. This came out after the announcement for Tcllib 1.10. Is there a plan to update to the newer version of Tcllib? Is it something that can be updated through Teacup?
LV Certainly teacup can update - if the newer items are available within the teapot repository you specify. If the repository owner hasn't updated to contain the latest version, then you can't update that way. In theory, you could also download and build yourself, and then install it somewhere for tcl to find.
However, are you certain you don't mean having just seen a notice about ActiveState ActiveTcl 8.4.16.x? Because 8.4.15 has been around for a few months now. Hmm, I don't see anything other than 8.4.15 available though. And that version was announced July 19, 2007.
escargo - Maybe I was delusional.
LV I doubt it. I suspect you might have seen some of the information around testing of tcl/tk 8.4.16 as well as tcl/tk 8.5 beta 1.
ActiveState offers the freely downloadable ActiveTcl as well as enterprise support (called "ActiveTcl Enterprise Edition" [L1 ]), etc. They have a section on Tcl mailing lists, with archives for a number of popular lists at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Tcl/Mail . The http://aspn.ActiveState.com/ASPN/Tcl/Reference/ page is a great online Tcl reference section, with links to papers from the Tcl'2002 US and European conferences as well as other resources.
See http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/ for mailing list subscription information.
ActiveTcl sometimes uses sources (along with other extensions) directly from the CVS repository, which may not correspond to an exact "official" release. But then, there are a number of Tcl packages which no longer appear to make official releases, pointing people to their CVS (svn, whatever) repositories if they want the code.
What: ActiveTcl (ActiveState)
Where: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Tcl/
http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActiveTcl
http://www.ActiveState.com/ActiveTcl
Description: Bundle of Tcl and related software, in binary form
(aka a "Batteries Included" distribution) - ready for installation.
Bundles for HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, and Windows are provided.
The releases of ActiveTcl include the latest
stable Tcl core as well as a number of popular extensions.
See the web site for specific versions in your specific ActiveTcl
release.
Version 8.5.1.x is now available.
Uses the ActiveState community license. If you intend on writing
commercial products, be certain to examine the license here carefully.
Updated: 08/2005
Contact: http://bugs.activestate.com/ActiveTcl/Other products offered by ActiveState are
VK Can anyone comment, why on earth ActiveTcl distribution comes with threads disabled, but ActivePerl distro has threads enabled, whereas threads in Perl are highly unstable and very resource-eating (see http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=288022 ). Do I need to re-compile for trying threads? What about ActivePython.
JH: Tcl threads are stable, but not all the extensions that ActiveTcl ships are thread-stable (like expect and TclX in particular). Until some more work is done on them, we don't want to destabilize their use by shipping a fully threaded ActiveTcl.
When reporting problems under activetcl, make use of
% parray activestate::config
or
% parray activestate::ActiveTcl
which both provide you with information about the specific build number, date the build occurred, platforms, etc. These arrays should be available in both the tclsh and the base-tcl (or base-tk) that is bundled in ActiveTcl.
If the above doesn't sound familar, perhaps you are looking for ActiveTcl (Frankinet)
IL Is there someplace where someone can retrieve earlier distros of ActiveTcl?
JH: Earlier versions of ActiveTcl are available directly from our downloads area.
MG found them at on the ActiveState FTP site at [L3 ]
I've just started playing with TCL and I have a REAL newbie question. I have two machines one has ActiveState's tcl batteries included dist and the other machine I compiled myself from source. Question is why is it that with the ActiveState dist I can go to my command line and just type the name of script (e.g helloworld.tcl) and it runs, however, on the machine where I compiled the sources i have to use the tclsh84 shell from the command line to get it to run. Did I do something wrong when I compiled and installed the sources myself?
MG Depends on several things, the most important of which is probably which OS you're using. But on Windows, at least, the ActiveTcl installer associates the .tcl file extension with wish automatically (and may well do on other platforms).
LV Most tcl scripts start with a line similar to:
#! /bin/tclsh or perhaps #! /bin/sh and some additional lines to find tclsh.
It sounds to me like the ActiveState tclsh is being found in your path, while the one that you are building is being installed in a directory that either isn't in your path, or at the very least, isn't being found FIRST in your path.
Recently on comp.lang.tcl someone asked how to install ActiveTcl on Linux. A rough outline of the steps are:
See also: