This page is intended as a forum for developing ideas about a tcl installer library.  The general goal is to have a library of tcl and tk code that can be used in constructing software installers.  Using this library, you would be able to write applications like:

   * a tcl/tk extension installer 
   * an application installer, eg for tcl/tk itself or any other application, tcl based or not 
   * a web based update agent

Discussion on this is happening on the tclish mailing list [http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=7626].  

Obviously, a tcl/tk extension installer will be a crucial component in a Tcl Extension Repository from which extensions can be downloaded and installed on demand.  Since this is a very simple application I ([Steve Cassidy]) thought I'd begin the library by prototyping this. You can find the code via my tcl page [http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/~steve/tcl/]. Here are the procedures I defined:
[[what about the Software AG one?]],
   installer::fetch uri -- fetch a file from a remote url
   installer::tmpdir -- locate a temporary directory
   installer::text_progress token total current -- display progress of something
   installer::unzip zipfile dir -- unzip a zipfile to a target directory
   installer::install_extension uri ?dir?  -- install a tcl extension from a uri
   installer::disk_free dir  -- how much free space is left in dir?
   installer::locate_package_dir  -- find a place on auto_path to install a package
   installer::bootstrap ?site?  -- download enough code to be able to run install_extension
   

My code makes use of the http extension from the core and mkZiplib by Michael Kraus [http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/mmg_kraus] which provides a nice thin wrapper around zlib.  I've provided alternate implementations of unzip which use zvfs (from freewrap) or an external unzip program if one can be found.  If none are present then the bootstrap proc could be used to download and install one for the platform. 

Another aspect of this is the shape of installable extension packages and of an online repository.  For some initial work on this see [Cantcl].


Other components of the installer library would include procedures to move files into different locations and to display a gui installer dialogue which is familiar to windows users. Please add your suggestions here...



























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Among the installers developers use for Tcl applications are
INNO [http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.htm],
VISE [http://www.mindvision.com/products.html] (available for MacOS and Windows),
Microsoft Installer (MSI),
Jeff's ActiveTcl installers (executable .zip),
InstallShield [http://www.installshield.com/],



WISE [http://www.wisesolutions.com/Default.htm],

... [[many others]] ...
Installer/GD,











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[[Explain [TEKI].]]