Version 6 of Quill

Updated 2014-08-31 16:22:47 by WHD

Quill is a new application, a project build system for Tcl projects.

Current Release: Quill 0.2.0

Notable Changes in v0.2.0

  • Support for arbitrary versions of TCL/TK (previously, Quill required that you be using Active 8.6).
  • Decreased dependence on ActiveTcl and TclDevKit (though these are still required for certain operations)
  • Support for building starpacks for other platforms (requires TDK)
  • Support for building distribution .zip files.
  • Improved help.

Quill is hosted at http://github.com/wduquette/tcl-quill ; please leave any bug reports in the Issue tracker on the repository home page.

In particular, Quill is intended to support development on Linux, OS X, and Windows, but is developed (at present) solely on OS X; please report any bugs found on other platforms so that I can fix them ASAP. - WHD

What is Quill?

Quill is patterned after the Leiningen build tool for the Clojure language. It is intended to handle the following tasks, and to make them as easy as possible:

  • Build project trees with skeleton apps, libraries, documentation, and test suites.
  • Manage external dependencies, pulling external packages in from a teapot server.
  • Run tests
  • Format HTML documentation
  • Build applications and libraries
  • Install applications and libraries for local use
  • Build distribution .zip files
  • Work with the project code in Tkcon

Automating Tasks with Quill:

Create a new project tree:

$ quill new app my-project myapp
...
$ cd my-project
$ ./bin/myapp.tcl 
my-project 0.0a0

Args: <>
$

Run the project tests:

$ quill test
... (runs tcltests; they'll fail until you add some real ones)

Build an executable, a starkit or a standalone executable

$ quill build
$ ./bin/myapp.kit

or

$ ./bin/myapp.exe

Install the application for local use:

$ quill install
$ ls ~/bin
myapp
$ myapp
my-project 0.0a0