[Pkg-tcltk-devel] Bug#436325: ppracer: FTBFS: error: tcl.h: No such file or directory

[Joe English]

Daniel Martin wrote:
> "Sergei Golovan" writes:
> > In fact, it was forgotten during a package upgrade, and I think it
> > will be restored in the next upload. But anyway, it's a hack, and if
> > the application doesn't use internal Tcl headers then it would be
> > better to use TCL_INCLUDE_SPEC variable, which expands to
> > "-I/usr/include/tcl8.4" (and this directory certainly contains tcl.h).
>
> Is there a similar variable for TK ?  I don't see a TK_INCLUDE_SPEC
> defined in /usr/lib/tk8.4/tkConfig.sh the way that the TCL variable is
> defined in tclConfig.sh.  Am I just supposed to use TCL_INCLUDE_SPEC
> and TK_XINCLUDES and that's it?

Hm.  This got added upstream a while back, but only in
the 8.5 series; the change was apparently never backported
to the 8.4 branch (ref SF bug #777203).

For the record, the recommended approach is to call
TEA_PUBLIC_TK_HEADERS (or TEA_PRIVATE_TK_HEADERS)
in configure.ac; that's supposed to do the right thing.

The TEA_{PUBLIC|PRIVATE}_{TCL|TK}_HEADERS autoconf macros
are defined in tcl.m4, available from Sourceforge CVS:

    http://tcl.cvs.sourceforge.net/tcl/tclconfig/

Be sure to use the TEA version of tcl.m4, *not* the version
in the tcl or tk source distributions.  They're very
different.

Sorry this isn't better documented.  The officially recommended
approach for building Tcl extensions is "Use TEA!", but exactly
what "Use TEA!" means is woefully underspecified.  In practice,
"grab a copy of the Tcl sample extension and tweak it" is what
most people do.


--Joe English

  jenglish at flightlab.com