From Newsgroup: comp.lang.tcl
On 7/23/25 09:20, saito wrote:
Congratulations! I was looking forward to this announcement.
Thanks for your very early interest, greatly appreciate the enthusiasm!
I noticed it is based on Tcl9. Is there a Tcl 8.x version?
A complete Tcl 8.6 branch (with all features backported to it,
especially our own SVG handling and virtual Fs) is built by CI and
supported. I was hoping to not have to manage twice more releases, and
somehow thought that since eTcl aims at providing a modernized
distribution, backward compatibility was less of an issue and focusing
on Tcl 9 would create an incentive to accelerate migration.
But I understand there are still plenty of needs for legacy code to be supported, and a Tcl 8.6 release brings convenience. So... Since it
seems you care for Windows release, I just uploaded a etcl86 release for Windows (64-bit), both:
- on https;//www.evotcl.com/ but until the UI of home page is updated,
you will have to use direct links:
https://www.evotcl.com/assets/distrib/v2.0.1/mswin/etcl86-2.0.1-mswin-x64-setup.exe
https://www.evotcl.com/assets/distrib/v2.0.1/mswin/etcl86-2.0.1-mswin-x64.zip
- on GitHub, as a distinct v2.0.1-tcl8 release, see:
https://github.com/evotcl/etcl/releases
If you are interested in Tcl8-based release for another platform, or for
the WebAssembly release, let me know (the latter is easy, it can be
deployed at any time by ourselves). Note that the 8.6 branch is much
less tested, so don't hesitate to share your experience with it.
Does the installation mess up any previous Tcl installs on the system? Sometimes they change file associations and stuff and it is difficult to restore things back.
The "distribution" is made of a battery-included, fully relocatable
single file executable, which does *not* need to save any configuration
in registry or anywhere. So if you use the ZIP or tar release, you can
safely expand the archive wherever you wish, and use it from there, side
by side with any other eTcl or Tcl/Tk distributions. The 'Settings'
activity in the default eTcl UI allows to set file associations, but
this is not triggered by default.
As a convenience, the Windows installer offers, during installation, an
option to register file association. There is a checkbox to control this option, so unless there is a bug in the installer configuration, file association should not be set unless requested. But if wanting to be reassured, getting the executable from the ZIP release and putting it
wherever you wish is the safe path.
Eric Hassold
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