Hi, thanks for having a look.
On Mon, 6 Jul 2026, Stuart Henderson wrote:
>
> This with ports/x/y/tcl8 and ports/x/y/tcl9 and various duplication
> and fiddling with Makefile.inc feels particularly awkward, especially
> when it needs replicating for every Tcl extension port.
>
> It should be possible to do this with non-conflicting flavours of the
> same port, similar to how python ports used to handle py2 + py3. The
> difference compared to old python being that with this, one would
> need to depend on the other, but I don't think that's a problem.
Ok, I think I've got something working.
Could you name a port that does/did this that I can use for example?
> Most of the mechanism would be common to all Tcl extension ports
> so could go in lang/tcl/tcl.port.mk so it's mostly one-time work to
> do the setup there, with smaller changes to the individual ports as
> they're moved across to it.
>
> For the files which need to be present in only one of the flavoured
> packages, I'd use the SUBST_VARS trick with a variable that defined to
> either "@comment " or "" and use that to prefix those files in PLIST so
> a single PLIST can be shared between the flavours. Other differences in
> PLISTs are mostly going to be formulaic so you'd have e.g. for these
Seems I'm successful with that, though I can't guess (yet) what could
be factored into tcl.port.mk.
> : libxyz123.so, libxyz123.so.0.0 and libxyzstub123.a.
> : libtcl9xyz123.so, libtcl9xyz123.so.0.0, and libxyzstub.a.
>
> you could set this in the tcl-xyz port
>
> MODTCL_LIBV= 123
>
> and in the module, other vars depending on the flavour (tcl8/tcl9),
> to either of
>
> MODTCL_EXTLIB= libtcl9
> MODTCL_STUB= stub.a
>
> MODTCL_EXTLIB= lib
> MODTCL_STUB= stub${MODTCL_LIBV}.a
I don't really get this but it doesn't seem as important right now.
I figure the right bits will make themselves evident once a few
ports have been converted.
I wan't too clear about the lib names.
Probably not obvious what they mean.
Basically two types: loadable-only and loadable/linkable+optional_stub.
Loadable libs in ${LOCALBASE}/lib/tcl/xyz
Linkable libs in ${LOCALBASE}/lib
The default names are:
Ver Loadable Linkable Stub
Tcl8 libxyz123.so libxyz123.so.0.0 libxyzstub123.a
Tcl9 libtcl9xyz123.so libtcl9xyz123.so.0.0 libxyzstub.a
I want the Tcl9 stub name to conform: libtcl9xyzstub123.a
I do think that the Tcl9 stub lib can be used for both.
Until that gets worked-out, I'd like to use this consistent naming.
Stu
