Official library of extensions

Initiated by Bryan Oakley on news:comp.lang.tcl Dejanews thread waaayyy back in early 1999: [L1 ]


Extensions which are already considered as official and included in the standard distribution of Tcl or Tk. [by whom? Who makes the decision that Tk is official and other extensions are not?] [I don't really get this official-vs-unofficial thing. What the community needs is a _large_ BI release which the community can update regularly and easily themselves. That'll never happen with some official thing that has a bottleneck of one or two people (or even 10 people) as gatekeepers -- there are too many extensions and too many platforms that they need to be compiled on. Perhaps one acceptable half-way situation would be that there's a bottleneck on who can *add* new modules, but then anyone can compile an existing module and upload the platform specific binary for their platform.]

[Here's my take on the deal. The TCT has a limited number of resources. They have volunteered to oversee the development and maintenance of Tcl and Tk. They do not have the time or energy to develop and maintain thousands of other extensions. So this page reflects those extensions to Tcl that the TCT is shepherding. If someone wants them to include another extension into this group, they need to submit a TIP for that action, discuss it over with the TCT, and work with them to get things done. See the Batteries Included page for a list of those people in the community working towards a central repository. If someone in the community wants to see something different than this, then they can feel free to start making it happen in some positive manner.]

In Tcl, there is:

dde
Win32 specific.
encoding
http
itcl
New in Tcl 8.5
msgcat
opt/optparse
Chris Nelson said that he would like to work on this one, and that he already had made some speed improvements. I submitted those improvements and I believe they'll be in 8.4 but N.B., the opt package is officially deprecated. -- CLN, with tcllib's cmdline being recommended as its successor.
platform and package::shell
registry
Win32 specific.
Tclapplescript
MacOS specific
resource
MacOS specific.
Stubs
TclOO
New in Tcl 8.5.
tcltest
tdbc
New in Tcl 8.6.
Thread
An extension that provides thread-support for Tcl (assuming that thread-support is present in the core at all; it's a compile-time option.)

Tk - a separate source and binary distribution

Are there any additional extensions that come in Tk?

Well, now there's Ttk.


There are also retro extensions:

These provide functionality that will be present in Tcl 8.5, but, it is my understanding, that in this form allow tcl/tk 8.4 users to also use.


Tcllib: pure-Tcl packages from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcllib/ . See Tcllib contents .


Tklib: pure-Tcl extension from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcllib/


Proposed extensions:


Others: Object-Oriented support (now available in Tcl via tcloo and itcl), megawidgets in Tk, ensembles, telnet, more image file format support - like png, jpg, etc., more Tk widgets, generic database interface (now available via tdbc), replacement for send that works cross platform and without requiring x, drag and drop,...

AK: The proposed extensions are something I believe that most will agree should be part of the library. In the "Others" section I listed everything else I could remember. We might have to discuss their placement.