Patching the tcl core

There is nothing to do if you are using a tclsh or wish containing the plus-patches (as provided by Jan Nijtmans).

For version 7.6plus please check that your patch was younger then Dec 12, 1996. A plus-patch older than this does not contain the required modifications. Skip ahead to the next section.

Note: No patch is required if you use Tcl 8.2 or beyond. Since that version of Tcl the Trf patch was made official and added to the core.

Well, it seems you have to do all the modifications by yourself. The required files reside in the patches-subdirectory of the source-directory. That is not quite true. They are in one of three subdirectories, named after the version of tcl they belong to. Select one of the directories and use the files in there. Don't mix files from different subdirectories (= tcl versions).

Now you have two choices.

1. Copy the 4 files tcl.h, tclIO.c, configure.in and configure to the appropriate locations, as given in the table below. People using Windows® should do this. They can safely ignore the files configure and configure.in, these are specific to unix.

   tcl.h	tclX.Y/generic/tcl.h
   tclIO.c	tclX.Y/generic/tclIO.c
   configure.in	tclX.Y/unix/configure.in
   configure	tclX.Y/unix/configure

   or,

2. Apply the 2 patches standard.patch and byteorder.patch. The appropriate working directories are

   7.6, 7.6p2	tclX.Y
   8.x	tclX.Y/generic

   Remark: The byteorder patch is required only if the availability of command binio is desired. See the OS specific section on how to activate its compilation.

   Recommendation: Unter 7.6 it is a good choice to activate binio, as there is no equivalent functionality available. Tcl 8.x on the other hand has fcopy and binary, so it is no loss if binio is left out.