Nowdays a threaded build is easy to install from the ports collection.
/usr/ports/lang/tcl8.4/
make WITH_THREADS=YES install
For an ordinary build/install of Tcl 8.3.4 on FreeBSD, the standard instructions should work just fine:
./configure make su (if needed) make install exit (the su) make test (if desired)
For a thread-enabled build, though:
./configure --enable-threads ... configure: warning: Don t know how to find pthread lib on your system - you must disable thread support or edit the LIBS in the Makefile... ...
So, here's the recipe, involving some file editing, for building, installing and testing a thread-enabled Tcl on FreeBSD:
LIBS = $(MATH_LIBS) -pthread
TCL_LIBS=' -lm -pthread'
LV why not submit a bug report to http://tcl.sf.net/ and have these fixes moved into the configure script for all ?
DGP See Tcl Bug 473708.
Jeff and I spent some time trying to fix this for the Tcl 8.3.4 release, but the apparent right fix for this on FreeBSD broke the build/test on AIX. Neither of us was willing to break something that was working for a patch release, so the backup solution was to post the FreeBSD work-around here. Since threaded builds on FreeBSD have never worked "out of the box" yet, we haven't lost anything.