Purpose: consolidate discussions about differences between a site where [Tcl]/[Tk]/[Tclvfs]/[metakit]/[incr tcl]/zlib are installed and a site where only [tclkit] is available.
Note that in some of these cases (such as the missing libraries and includes)
the reason is that tclkit is not intended for the same audience as the
source or even a traditional binary distribution.

The reason it is important to track the differences, though, is that sometimes users attempt to use tclkit as the base for software development - knowing these differences will hopefully save them some questions.


What things can someone expect to find different when using Tclkit rather
than a full install from authority source distributions?


   1. Documentation - tclkit comes with none of the man pages/etc. There is a [Tclkit DOK commands] [starkit] containing the Tcl and Tk docs, but I don't think that currently there is one containing docs for everything that comes in the tclkit.  Creating a [wikit] or a DOK command (or even a [PDF]) containing the documentation for everything within a tclkit could, however, meet the need.
   1. Demos - tclkit is intended to be small.  However, the demos for Tk are available as a starkit from the [sdarchive].  Do demos for the other parts of tclkit exist, and if so, are they available in a starkit?
   1. Encodings - only a minimal number of encodings are available. (One can [register new encodings at runtime].) [[Is there a page describing the consequences of this? -- ''ummm'', well: the consequence that made me add this link is that '''fconfigure''' ''myfile'' '''-encoding''' ''myencoding'' no longer crashes the application (where ''myencoding == shiftjis''); but maybe you're just looking for a page on encodings? [[ ... btw., I don't think this is the best place for this question. Can we move it to a different page? ]] ]]
   1. Libraries - tclkit is a static build, so no dynamically loadable tclXX.dll or .so's (or other libraries) for linking are in the tclkit starkit.
   1. Includes - tclkit does not include tcl.h or any other header files someone might need to compile a new extension.
   1. Files within a Tclkit or starkit are accessed only via [VFS].  There are limitations and differences in file and directory behavior through VFS that are not present when using native file handling.  See [tclvfs] page for some of the differences.
   1. The boundary between the real (external filesystem) and the internal filesystem is not always seamless (e.g. glob */* across the boundary won't do what it should).  This difference will be fixed in Tcl 8.5.

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[Category Tclkit]