Forum OpenACS Q&A: Does OpenACS 3.x really require libpgtcl.so?

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1: Does OpenACS 3.x really require libpgtcl.so?
Posted by Jonathan Marsden on 04/28/01 02:03 PM
Both older RPMs (by John Xing, and the first set made by me, which used his as a starting point) and the current .deb packages for OpenACS explicitly state a requirement for libpgtcl.

However, I can't see what breaks if you leave it out!

This is not really of interest to those installing from source, but the PG 7.1 RPMs split out things so there is a separate postgresql-tcl RPM, and it would be good to be 100% sure whether or not this RPM is really needed to run OpenACS.

Any insight into this would be most welcome 😊

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2: Response to Does OpenACS 3.x really require libpgtcl.so? (response to 1)
Posted by Dan Wickstrom on 04/28/01 02:33 PM
Don Baccus has created a bboard search utility for openacs which is based on libpgtcl.  So if you want bboard search to work, you need libpgtcl, but other than that, I don't think there is anything else in openacs that requires it.
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3: Response to Does OpenACS 3.x really require libpgtcl.so? (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 04/28/01 03:31 PM
Dan's right.  I've not installed the 7.1 RPMs, but when building from sources "--with-tcl" also tries to build TK, and on two of my systems something required by TK (wish?) didn't exist.  So I've needed to build "--with-tcl --without-tk".  Do the distributed 7.1 RPMs give you that level of granularity?
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4: Response to Does OpenACS 3.x really require libpgtcl.so? (response to 1)
Posted by Roberto Mello on 04/28/01 05:05 PM
Added to Release Notes for 3.2.5: Bboard searching requires PL/Tcl.
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5: Response to Does OpenACS 3.x really require libpgtcl.so? (response to 1)
Posted by Roberto Mello on 04/28/01 05:30 PM
Nevermind. I hadn't realized that this had been added before 3.2.4, so it's in the UPGRADING.txt file.
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6: Response to Does OpenACS 3.x really require libpgtcl.so? (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Marsden on 04/28/01 07:51 PM
Don wrote:
I've not installed the 7.1 RPMs, but when building from sources "--with-tcl" also tries to build TK, and on two of my systems something required by TK (wish?) didn't exist. So I've needed to build "--with-tcl --without-tk". Do the distributed 7.1 RPMs give you that level of granularity?

I'm not too concerned about requirements to rebuild PG 7.1 RPMs from SRPMs, since that is Lamar's job anyway 😊 The postgresql-tcl binary RPM adds exactly six files to your machine:

  • /usr/bin/pgtclsh
  • /usr/lib/libpgtcl.so
  • /usr/lib/libpgtcl.so.2
  • /usr/lib/libpgtcl.so.2.1
  • /usr/lib/pltcl.so
  • /usr/man/man1/pgtclsh.1.gz

and two of those are symlinks. So that seems sufficiently granular. I saw the requires statement in the earlier RPMs, but then found that OpenACS 3.2.4 'worked' for me without postgresql-tcl installed. So I was confused about what was going on there.

I think bboard searching is off by default, so the question becomes whether we need to force RPM users to install postgres-tcl just to satisfy a dependency they may never actually need, or document this so that they know that this option requires libpgtcl.so? Maybe leave it out of the requirements but ensure there is a clear comment in the config file where one would turn on bboard searches about this?

I should try it for myself... but how clear are the error messages when you try to enable bboard searches and the utility concerned can't find libpgtcl.so ?

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7: Response to Does OpenACS 3.x really require libpgtcl.so? (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Marsden on 04/28/01 10:40 PM
Roberto: something to think about...

Is UPGRADING.txt the right place for information that applies to people using OpenACS for the first time, as well as those upgrading from earlier versions? I suspect some (many?) newcomers might skip reading a file with that name because they are not 'upgrading'. I don't have a wonderful "better" place to put the info, but we should probably think about putting it somewhere more visible to newcomers as well as to upgraders.

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8: Response to Does OpenACS 3.x really require libpgtcl.so? (response to 1)
Posted by Roberto Mello on 04/29/01 12:29 AM
No, the best place IMHO would be the README and the release notes. Will add that to the README just to be on the safe side. Thanks.