Why so many tcl's and tk's

[Garrett Cooper]

On Mar 13, 2007, at 10:47 PM, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 06:46:48PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> Begin forwarded message:
>>
>>> From: Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen at math.missouri.edu>
>>> Date: March 13, 2007 3:48:56 PM PDT
>>> To: freebsd-ports at freebsd.org
>>> Subject: Re: Why so many tcl's and tk's
>>>
>>> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 04:09:26PM -0500, Stephen Montgomery-Smith
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> Are the different versions of tcl and tk really not backwards
>>>>> compatible with earlier versions?
>>>> No, they are not.
>>>
>>> What a pity.  So how come the various linux distributions seem to
>>> get away with only one version of tcl and tk?
>>
>> Better versioning in their package infrastructure?
>
> Dunno what you mean by this.
>
> Kris

Actually after doing a bit of research it appears that what I meant  
in my reply is incorrect. From what I can see Linux uses a method of  
branching with its tcl and tk packages similar to what FreeBSD does.  
I know my sample size is small, but I'm pretty sure it's a defacto  
standard if these two distros do the branch versioning that I see:

Debian (scroll almost all the way to the bottom to find the tk refs):
- http://packages.debian.org/stable/libs/
Gentoo:
- http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=tcl

-Garrett