Re: #! magic for finding Cygwin Tcl shell

[Bart Veer <bartv@ecoscentric.com>]

>>>>> "John" == John Dallaway <john@dallaway.org.uk> writes:

    John> I was looking at support for UNC file paths in the eCos
    John> Configuration Tool today. The convoluted #! magic we use in
    John> our Tcl scripts to find a Cygwin Tcl shell is getting in the
    John> way when calling (eg) heapgen.tcl via a UNC repository path.
    John> This code is only needed to support installations of Cygwin
    John> that are more than 5 years old.

    John> Rather than increase the complexity of the #! magic still
    John> further, I think it now makes sense to revert to a simple
    John> "#! /usr/bin/tclsh" within our Tcl scripts. However, this
    John> would break compatibility with old Cygwin installations
    John> providing only tclsh8*.exe or cygtclsh80.exe.

    John> Any objections?

There is another approach we could consider. Instead of invoking
"tclsh", we could invoke "ecosconfig tclsh". That would require a
minor change to ecosconfig. Combine that with a statically linked
build of ecosconfig, and we should end up with something much more
robust than the current approach of depending on whatever version of
Tcl happens to be installed, somewhere, under some name or other.

However, any changes along those lines should probably wait until
after the 3.0 release. AFAIK, what we have right now seems to work
well enough.

Bart

-- 
Bart Veer                                   eCos Configuration Architect
eCosCentric Limited    The eCos experts      http://www.ecoscentric.com/
Barnwell House, Barnwell Drive, Cambridge, UK.      Tel: +44 1223 245571
Registered in England and Wales: Reg No 4422071.