This chapter describes how to build and install pgtcl, making it available for use in your applications. You should check the release for README or INSTALL files, which may contain more up-to-date information.
This chapter only applies to the pgtcl-ng implementation of pgtcl. For other implementations, check the included documentation.
To build pgtcl on Unix-like Systems, you need:
Tcl/Tk version 8.3.1 or higher, with 8.4.4 or higher strongly recommended.
PostgreSQL version 7.4 or higher, with 8.1.4 or higher recommended.
The usual building tools such as C compiler, make, and a shell.
Pgtcl is Tcl Extension Architecture (TEA) compliant, shipping with a standard configure script. You do not need to have a PostgreSQL source distribution available to build pgtcl, but you need a PostgreSQL installation with libraries and header files.
After unpacking the pgtcl distribution, change directory into the top level of the distribution.
To configure pgtcl, you must specify the path to the PostgreSQL include files and library files. If you have the pg_config program, supplied with PostgreSQL, on your PATH, you can use it to specify the directories as follows:
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local \ --libdir=/usr/lib/tcl8.4 \ --with-postgres-include=$(pg_config --includedir) \ --with-postgres-lib=$(pg_config --libdir)
If you don't have pg_config available, you can specify the directories on the command line, for example:
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local \ --libdir=/usr/lib/tcl8.4 \ --with-postgres-include=/opt/postgres/include \ --with-postgres-lib=/opt/postgres/lib
assuming you have installed PostgreSQL in the directory /opt/postgres .
In the above configure commands, we have specified both --prefix and --libdir. If you are going to manually install the product (which is easy, since there is just one file produced), you can use anything you want or omit these. If you plan to use the install target in the Makefile, you need to point --libdir to a location where Tcl will look for package directories. On a typical system, this may be /usr/lib/tcl8.4/ as shown above. The --prefix is only used for the header file installation (which is normally not needed anyway).
To build pgtcl, just type:
$ make
If all goes well, you will end up with a sharable library file named something like libpgtcl#.#.#.so.
You can install pgtcl with:
$ make install
to install everything in the paths set during configure, as indicated above. If the paths are chosen right, the result will be enabled for package loading, as described in Section 3.1.
You may choose instead to manually install pgtcl. Refer to Chapter 3 for methods of using pgtcl with your application. If you will be loading libpgtcl directly in your application, you need only copy that file into a convenient location for loading. Note that libpgtcl will need to find the PostgreSQL libpq loadable library.
If you want to be able to load pgtcl into applications using
package require Pgtcl
you need to install libpgtcl into a subdirectory of Tcl's tcl_pkgPath or auto_path, and include the file pkgIndex.tcl which tells Tcl how to load the package. For example:
$ mkdir /usr/lib/tcl8.4/pgtcl1.5 $ cp libpgtcl1.5.2.so pkgIndex.tcl /usr/lib/tcl8.4/pgtcl1.5
This is what the make install target does. Note: The name of the directory under the Tcl library directory is not important, as the extension will be found regardless of the directory name. You may choose to use the three-part version number in the name, or just the major and minor version numbers.