struct_install_guide - Struct - The Installer's Guide
Welcome to Struct, a set of packages providing various data structures to Tcl, and additional operations for existing Tcl structures.
The audience of this document is anyone wishing to build the packages, for either themselves, or others.
For a developer intending to extend or modify the packages we additionally provide
Please read Struct - How To Get The Sources first, if that was not done already. Here we assume that the sources are already available in a directory of your choice.
Before Struct can be build and used a number of requisites must be installed. These are:
The scripting language Tcl. For details see Tcl.
The critcl package (C embedding) for Tcl. For details see CriTcl.
This list assumes that the machine where Struct is to be installed is essentially clean. Of course, if parts of the dependencies listed below are already installed the associated steps can be skipped. It is still recommended to read their sections though, to validate that the dependencies they talk about are indeed installed.
As we are building a Tcl package that should be pretty much obvious that a working Tcl installation is needed, and I will not belabor the point.
Out of the many use whatever you are comfortable with, as long as it provides Tcl 8.5, or higher.
This may be a Tcl installation provided by your operating system distribution, from a distribution-independent vendor, or built by yurself.
Myself, I used ActiveState's ActiveTcl 8.5 distribution during development of the binding, as I am most familiar with it.
(Disclosure: I, Andreas Kupries, work for ActiveState, maintaining ActiveTcl and TclDevKit for them).
This distribution can be found at http://www.activestate.com/activetcl. Retrieve the archive of ActiveTcl 8.5 for your platform and install it as directed by ActiveState.
Assuming that ActiveTcl got installed I usually run the command
teacup update
to install all packages ActiveState provides, and the kitchensink, as the distribution itself usually contains only the ost important set of packages. This ensures that the dependencies for CriTcl, and Struct are all present, and more.
If that is not your liking you have to read the sections for CriTcl, and Struct to determine the exact set of packages required, and install only these using
teacup install $packagename
Both teacup commands above assume that ActiveState's TEApot repository at http://teapot.activestate.com is in the list of repositories accessible to teacup. This is automatically ensured for the ActiveTcl distribution. Others may have to run
teacup archive add http://teapot.activestate.com
to make this happen.
For those wishing to build Tcl/Tk on their own, their sources can be found at
To build Struct the tool critcl is required.
Struct's build system accepts it either as an application found in the PATH, or as a Tcl package available to the tclsh used to run their build & installation processes.
Struct must have version 3.1.1, and critcl::class version 1.0.3, or higher.
The github repository for critcl can be found at http://jcw.github.com/critcl.
At the above url is also an explanation on how to build and install CriTcl, including a list of its dependencies.
Its instructions will not be repeated here. If there are problems with their directions please file a bug against the critcl project, and not Struct.
To install Struct simply run
/path/to/tclsh8.5 /path/to/struct/build.tcl install
where "/path/to/tclsh8.5" is the tclsh of your Tcl installation, and "/path/to/struct" the location of the Struct sources on your system.
This builds all packages and then places them in a directory where the tclsh8.5 will find them.
On Windows you can invoke the file "build.tcl" with a double-click. This will pop up a small graphical interface for entering the destination and performing the installation. This handling of a double-click is restricted to Windows only however.
On unix the same GUI is acessible by invoking "build.tcl" without any arguments.
To get help about the methods of "build.tcl", and their complete syntax, invoke "build.tcl" with argument help, i.e., like
/path/to/tclsh8.5 /path/to/struct/build.tcl help
This document, and the package it describes, will undoubtedly contain bugs and other problems. Please report such at the Struct Tracker. Please also report any ideas for enhancements you may have for either package and/or documentation.
Data structures