The second presentation after D. Richard Hipp's SQLite keynote was Jeff Hobb's ActiveState of Tcl.
Reviewed Tcl development history. New versions of Tcl/Dev Kit, other AS programs. Added support for OS X very near. Reviewed major developments in Tcl 8.4 and 8.5. (8.4 20%-30% performance improvements, matches 8.0 [pre-unicode] speed, but now with Unicode & solid threading support, unlike 8.0)
Hopefully 8.5 will go beta in December 2006 with a target of a spring 2007 release. 8.6 or 9.0 after? Will depend on what TIPs get complete for 8.5 and which ones slip.
New TEAPOT package repository. Teapot is the server; teacup is the client (separate clients for "admin" and regular users apparently). Consider the version on the conference CD as a release candidate, final release later this month.
Does require TIP #268 versioning (which they've back ported to 8.4). Command line only client yet, no GUI (they want to get the client solid first). SQLite database is used as the meta data store.
Two archive formats: Tcl module (meta data embedded as Tcl comment(s)). Zip archive (general; meta data stored in .zip file teapot.txt). No [centralized] documentation integration integration yet.
ActiveState won't take binary submissions from package authors--their teapot server will only host binaries they've built from source. Other people can run teapot servers and a teapot client can be configured to point to multiple teapots.
—Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, October 11, 2006 at 11:19
What kind of OSX support are they adding???
Thanks for the blogging, sir! And teapot sounds interesting.