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## Cross-platform porting

Our current release (May 97) is Tycho0.1.1. We are in the beta phase of Tycho0.2, which will be final in June 1997.

On the Macintosh, Tycho0.2 requires Itcl2.2p2. Under Itcl2.2 on the Macintosh, Tycho0.1.1 was crashing during startup. Unfortunately, inserting `puts` statements would move the location of the crash around. Jim Ingham, (formerly at Lucent, now at Sun) determined that the problem was that the Itcl2.2 Macintosh binaries had too small a stack to load all of Tycho. Under Itcl2.2p2, the Macintosh port starts up on some machines, but we were never able to complete startup under on the infamous PowerBook 5300c.

We've tested Tycho0.1.1 and Tycho0.2 under NT, and most features work. The biggest problem is that non-blocking I/O is not available in the prebuilt Windows binaries. Under Windows, certain features of Tycho that start up subprocesses using non-blocking I/O do not work as they do under Unix. Unfortunately, the Macintosh does not even have `exec`, so the Macintosh port is even more limited.

A major issue facing the Macintosh and NT ports is the presence of spaces in file names. Passing filename arguments that contain spaces can be a little tricky. Support for file names with spaces could be improved - for example, the Tk4.2 demos that come with the prebuilt Itcl2.2 binaries do not work if there is a space in the pathname. Configuring Tcl8.0b under Unix also fails if there is a space in the prefix option to configure.

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