Some tips and tricks for Tcl/Tk and extensions on Solaris.

Getting Tcl/Tk for Solaris:

ActiveState is now building binaries of ActiveTcl for Solaris,
available at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActiveTcl/.
It is the most up-to-date and comprehensive binary available
for Solaris right now.  Unfortunately, the BLT extension is
not yet included (as of July 2001).

http://sunfreeware.com/ is also another useful location for
binary packages, but the Tcl and expect versions there are rather dated.

Building Tcl/Tk on Solaris:

First, make absolutely sure you have eradicated all instances of 
/usr/ucb from your environment.  Remove instances from your PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc. until the following command comes up empty:

  env | grep /usr/ucb

The reason for doing this is that there are, in various combinations of Solaris, conflicts between the functions found in the /usr/ucb libraries and the /usr/lib libraries.  Mixing the two is almost certain to cause malfunctioning applications on various iterations of Solaris.  For instance, one conflict that [LV] has found is that at times, using functions compiled against the /usr/ucb libraries results in directory reading functions which think they are a different format than libraries compiled against non-ucb libraries.  This manifests itself as glob's failing, or directory entries missing letters, etc. 

A decent ANSI C compiler should be your next quest and you basically 
have two choices -- the free gcc compiler or Sun's non-free SunPro C
compiler.

gcc:

Pre-built binaries for specific versions of Solaris are available at
http://sunfreeware.com/ -- be absolutely sure to get a version for 
your ''exact'' version of Solaris, as a gcc installation is very
tightly coupled to the Solaris header files, which tend to "evolve"
between OS versions.  Any of the gcc binaries at this site may be 
used to build Tcl/Tk and all of the C-based extensions.  A more 
recent version of gcc (such as 2.95.3) is suggested for C++ extensions,
which one would build from source using an older gcc binary.

SunPro/Forte C:

The name has apparently evolved now.  More information is available 
at http://www.sun.com/forte/c/ as are trial downloads.  Historically
the SunPro compiler had done a better job at high optimization levels,
which are mostly irrelevant for Tcl/Tk and extensions.


Other build tools:

Be certain to have /usr/ccs/bin in your PATH, so that you can find make, ar, and other useful tools.

The Build:

Once you have either of the above compilers installed and in 
your path, Tcl source
and most extensions should build with:

  ./configure && make && make test && make install

If you want to use cc, consider a slight variant:

   CC=cc
   export CC
  ./configure && make && make test && make install

Otherwise, the configure defaults to looking for gcc .


WARNING!  Solaris comes with a file called /usr/ucb/cc .  This is a shell that sets environment flags , etc. to put the ucb libraries into the compile environment.  Be certain NOT to run that version of cc (see above).