A pretty widespread [Linux] distribution. 

[Jeff Hobbs] warned in the [Tcl chatroom] on 2003-05-20: "for reference for anyone else here, RH9 sucks, and sucks especially for what they did to Tk on it.  Do not use the RH9 default Tcl/Tk install."

What exactly did they do to it? - davidw

[JE] RH9 patches the core to use 32-bit Tcl_UniChars (the default is 16 bit).   This breaks the stubs table guarantee;  as a result, Tcl extensions built on another Linux distro (including earlier RH releases) won't work on RH9. 

Plus, they're still distributing Tcl 8.3.5, which is way out of date.

Good alternatives are [Debian], [Suse], and [Mandrake].

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Is there any mysterious reason why RedHat does not use Tcl8.4, but still distributes Tcl8.3 (in RedHat 9)?
It is the only reason why I distribute my Tcl programs as Tcl8.3 versions.
Suse has used Tcl8.4 for a long time. Do not tell me about stable versions. Suse is also stable with Tcl8.4.

It seems that [Suse] supports Tcl better than RedHat. Suse 8.2 distribution has a special package managment point (Tcl-Development) and has also [Visual tcl] and [SpecTcl] as RPM packages.


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