Re: ANNOUNCE: cookit v2.2.0

On Sat, 28 Sep 2024 09:04:39 +0530
Ashok <apnmbx-public@yahoo.com> wrote:

Looking quite exciting and plan to check it out over the weekend.
 
Some initial questions -
 
- Am I right that because the packages (tdom, twapi) are statically
linked, the shared libraries do not need to be written to disk before
loading? That would be a big win.

This is true for Windows platform. Everything is statically linked
there, and there are no dlls. However, packages with shared library can
of course be added to a wrapped application and loaded during runtime.

This is partly true for Unix. Everything except Tk is statically linked
on Linux/macOS. Tk built as a shared library for Unix, stored in vfs
and can be loaded by usual "package require Tk". This is to avoid hard
dependencies in executable on GUI libraries and to be able to work both
in an environment where the GUI is present and not present. It is
possible to write something like:

if { [catch { package require Tk }] } {
    # we have GUI and let's show our windows
} else {
    # we don't have GUI and let's continue in console mode
}

- It would be nice to have sqlite3, if not TDBC.

I agree. sqlite3 is widely used in modern software as a structured
storage for local data and this feature can be useful. From other side,
the goal is to keep a balance between executable size and features.

I will try to find out the best option for including sqlite3.

- I did not understand the section about the installer. If it is a
single file exe, why the installer?

There are multiple standalone cookits: with Tk/without Tk, with
Tcl8/Tcl9. Installer downloads an archive with all these variants
and extracts them to local directory in one shot.

There are also minor features like setting PATH on Windows, ability to
install using the single command.

Basically, installer is one of cookit builds, but on Windows it
contains Tcl script of a few lines, and on Unix it is wrapped in a
shell script:
https://github.com/chpock/cookit/blob/cc041f21aff1247e7000a1497ce76819695725df/release.sh#L47-L65

- The wiki cookit page references the old repository.

Wiki references another project from original cookfs/cookit authors.
Unfortunatelly, that project is dead now.

My project is based on similar ideas, and I could not find a better
name than cookit. Thus, I just shamefacedly stole this name. I hope
this does not cause too much confusion. The old project is cookit 1.x,
but the project in this thread is cookit 2.x.

--
Best regards,
Konstantin Kushnir