A pretty widespread [Linux] distribution. 

[Jeff Hobbs] warned in the [Tcl chatroom] on 2003-05-20: "for reference for anyone else here, RH9 sucks, and sucks especially for what they did to Tk on it.  Do not use the RH9 default Tcl/Tk install."

What exactly did they do to it? - davidw

[JE] RH9 patches the core to use 32-bit Tcl_UniChars (the default is 16 bit).   This breaks the stubs table guarantee;  as a result, Tcl extensions built on another Linux distro (including earlier RH releases) won't work on RH9.  Plus, they're still distributing Tcl 8.3.5, which is way out of date.  There are probably some other problems as well.

Good alternatives are [Debian], [Suse], and [Mandrake].

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Is there any mysterious reason why RedHat does not use Tcl8.4, but still distributes Tcl8.3 (in RedHat 9)?
It is the only reason why I distribute my Tcl programs as Tcl8.3 versions.
Suse has used Tcl8.4 for a long time. Do not tell me about stable versions. Suse is also stable with Tcl8.4.

It seems that [Suse] supports Tcl better than RedHat. Suse 8.2 distribution has a special package managment point (Tcl-Development) and has also [Visual tcl] and [SpecTcl] as RPM packages.

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[LES]: I have tried 12 distros and found RedHat the best all-around. '''But''': I use RedHat 7.3, considered the best by many RH fans, '''AND''' I never tried [SUSE].

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