[Starkit] filleting tcllib

[Michael Schlenker]

[added cc: to tcllib-devel list]

Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
>>Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
>>
>>>Tcllib is now quite big (4.5MB+), and individual packages often have
>>>significant dependencies.  Including the whole of tcllib in a starkit
>>>that is going to be downloaded by many users for a single usage
>>>introduces a significant download penalty, particularly for dialup
>>>users, but is unlikely to be of concern to those who are downloading
>>>and installing a conventional Tcl/Tk installation.
>>>
>>>Has anyone given any thought to a method for filleting tcllib, i.e.
>>>specifying a list of packages known to be required, and ensuring that
>>>those packages plus all dependencies are extracted and placed
>>>appropriately in a .vfs tree?   Doing it by hand is moderately
>>>painful, and I wonder if some clever use of [package ifneeded],
>>>perhaps grabbing all the pkgIndex.tcl files and programmatically
>>>rewriting them to replace the "source [file join...." element with a
>>>"[file copy..." or two might be a way forward.
>>>
>>
>>Most of the time I only need one or two packages and figuring out
>>which to include has been relatively simple sofar. 
>>
>>Perhaps rather than a programmatic solution, we should provide 
>>a chart depicting which packages are required by which others?
> 
> 
> I suppose what I am saying is that it's getting to the point with some
> of our work where figuring out what to include is not so simple, but
> considered use of the pkgIndex.tcl files and perhaps grep'ing for
> package require lines might yield a tool of use to several if not
> many (not limited just to tcllib, of course).
> 
For tcllib, i think the best way would be to either add such information 
to the package documentation, so it can be automatically extracted or 
add it to the source and add an option to sak.tcl. The sak.tcl tool 
probably has some logic for things already, but thats Andreas Kupries 
domain...

IIRC the ActiveState helper apps for creating kits maintain some package 
description which includes dependencies...

Michael