Building Tcl Blend under Windows

About:

Tcl Blend is built under Windows using a configure script and the Mingw/Msys package. The Mingw/Msys package is a minimal unix style shell environment used to execute a configure script under Windows. Tcl Blend depends on Tcl and the Tcl Threads extension.

First, download the Mingw/Msys zip file here and extract into C:/ or some other location on your machine. See the included README.TXT file for more info about how to start the msys shell.

Second, download Tcl (8.4.13) , the Tcl Threads package (2.6.3) , and the Tcl Blend (1.4.0) archive files and save them in a temp directory. The following assumes that the user has created a temp directory /build/tclblend, that the archives have been saved in this directory, and that the JDK install is located in C:/jdk14 which is referred to as /c/jdk14 when passed to the configure script. 


mkdir /build
mkdir /build/tclblend
cd /build/tclblend
(Save archives in C:/msys/build/tclblend)

unzip tcl8413-src.zip
unzip thread263.zip
unzip tclBlend140.zip

mkdir build_tcl
mkdir build_thread
mkdir build_tclblend

cd build_tcl
../tcl8.4.13/win/configure --prefix=/opt/tclblend --enable-threads
make
make install
cd ..

cd build_thread
../thread263/configure --prefix=/opt/tclblend --enable-threads \
  --with-tcl=/build/tclblend/build_tcl
make
make install
cd ..

cd build_tclblend
../tclBlend1.4.0/configure --prefix=/opt/tclblend \
  --with-tcl=/build/tclblend/build_tcl --with-thread=/build/tclblend/build_thread \
  --with-jdk=/opt/jdk14
make
make install

At this point, Tcl, the Thread extension, and Tcl Blend have been installed into /opt/tclblend. One can also build and run the optional Tcl Blend regression tests with the following command. 


make test

The install process creates two startup scripts that should be used to run Tcl Blend. The first is called jtclsh and is used to launch Tcl Blend from a msys shell. The second is called jtclsh.bat and is used to launch Tcl Blend from a Windows cmd prompt or from the Windows Explorer. Both of these scripts would be installed into the /opt/tclblend/bin directory (C:/msys/opt/tclblend/bin) by the example above. 


(From the msys shell)
/opt/tclblend/bin/jtclsh
% package require java
1.4.0
% exit

(From Windows Explorer, double click on jtclsh.bat)
% package require java
1.4.0
% exit

Installed Files