merged 8.1.0 changes into mainline

1 files changed, 41 insertions, 234 deletions

diff --git a/README b/README
index f08ef26..0814707 100644
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -1,27 +1,23 @@
 README:  Tcl
+    This is the Tcl 8.1 source distribution.
 
-	Tcl is maintained, enhanced, and distributed freely as a
-	service to the Tcl community by Scriptics Corporation.
-
-RCS: @(#) $Id: README,v 1.17 1999/04/21 21:50:22 rjohnson Exp $
+RCS: @(#) $Id: README,v 1.18 1999/04/24 01:46:51 stanton Exp $
 
 Contents
 --------
     1. Introduction
     2. Documentation
     3. Compiling and installing Tcl
-    4. Summary of changes in Tcl 8.1
-    5. Development tools
-    6. Tcl newsgroup
-    7. Tcl contributed archive
-    8. Tcl Resource Center
-    9. Mailing lists
-    10. Support and bug fixes
-    11. Tcl version numbers
+    4. Development tools
+    5. Tcl newsgroup
+    6. Tcl contributed archive
+    7. Tcl Resource Center
+    8. Mailing lists
+    9. Support and Training
+    10. Thank You
 
 1. Introduction
 ---------------
-
 Tcl provides a powerful platform for creating integration
 applications that tie together diverse applications, protocols,
 devices, and frameworks.  When paired with the Tk toolkit, Tcl
@@ -30,17 +26,11 @@ that run on PCs, Unix, and the Macintosh.  Tcl can also be used for a
 variety of web-related tasks and for creating powerful command
 languages for applications.
 
-This directory contains the sources and documentation for Tcl.  The
-information here corresponds to release 8.1.0.
+Tcl is maintained, enhanced, and distributed freely as a
+service to the Tcl community by Scriptics Corporation.
+The official home for Tcl/Tk is on the Scriptics Web site:
 
-Tcl 8.1 includes four major new features: Unicode support (all internal
-strings are now stored in UTF-8 form), a new regular expression matcher
-which surpass the features of Perl, support for multithreading, and a
-new message catalog package.  For details on features,
-incompatibilities, and potential problems with this release, see the
-Tcl/Tk 8.1 Web page at http://www.scriptics.com/software/8.1.html or
-refer to the "changes" file in this directory, which contains a
-historical record of all changes to Tcl.
+    http://www.scriptics.com
 
 Tcl is a freely available open source package.  You can do virtually
 anything you like with it, such as modifying it, redistributing it,
@@ -48,36 +38,23 @@ and selling it either in whole or in part.  See the file
 "license.terms" for complete information.
 
 2. Documentation
-----------------
-
-The best way to get started with Tcl is to read about Tcl on the
-Scriptics Web site at:
-
-	http://www.scriptics.com/scripting
-
-Another good way to get started with Tcl is to read one of the
-introductory books on Tcl:
-
-    Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk, 2nd Edition, by Brent Welch,
-    Prentice-Hall, 1997, ISBN 0-13-616830-2
-
-    Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, by John Ousterhout,
-    Addison-Wesley, 1994, ISBN 0-201-63337-X
+---------------
 
-    Exploring Expect, by Don Libes,
-    O'Reilly and Associates, 1995, ISBN 1-56592-090-2
+Extensive documentation is available at our website.  The
+home page for this release is
+    http://www.scriptics.com/software/8.1.html
 
-Other books are listed at
-http://www.scriptics.com/resource/doc/books/
+Information about new features in 8.1 can be found at
+    http://www.scriptics.com/software/whatsnew81.html
 
-There is also an official home for Tcl and Tk on the Scriptics Web site:
+Detailed release notes can be found at
+    http://www.scriptics.com/software/relnotes/tcl8.1
 
-	http://www.scriptics.com
+Information about Tcl itself can be found at
+    http://www.scriptics.com/scripting/
 
-These Web pages include information about the latest releases, products
-related to Tcl and Tk, reports on bug fixes and porting issues, HTML
-versions of the manual pages, and pointers to many other Tcl/Tk Web
-pages at other sites.  Check them out!
+There are many Tcl books on the market.  Most are listed at
+    http://www.scriptics.com/resource/doc/books/
 
 2a. Unix Documentation
 ----------------------
@@ -103,7 +80,7 @@ using the normal "man" mechanisms, such as
 -------------------------
 
 The "doc/help" subdirectory in this release contains a complete set of
-Windows help files for TclPro.  Once you install this Tcl release, a
+Windows help files for Tcl.  Once you install this Tcl release, a
 shortcut to the Windows help Tcl documentation will appear in the
 "Start" menu:
 
@@ -112,116 +89,13 @@ shortcut to the Windows help Tcl documentation will appear in the
 3. Compiling and installing Tcl
 -------------------------------
 
-This release contains everything you should need to compile and run
-Tcl under UNIX, PCs (either Windows NT, Windows 95, or Win 3.1 with
-Win32s), and Macintoshes.
-
-Before trying to compile Tcl you should do the following things:
-
-    (a) Check for a binary release.  Pre-compiled binary releases are
-        available now for PCs, Macintoshes, and several flavors of UNIX.
-        Binary releases are much easier to install than source releases.
-        To find out whether a binary release is available for your
-        platform, check the Scriptics Tcl Resource Center
-        (http://www.scriptics.com/resource).  Also, check in
-        the FTP directory from which you retrieved the base
-        distribution.
-
-    (b) Make sure you have the most recent patch release.  Look in the
-	FTP directory from which you retrieved this distribution to see
-	if it has been updated with patches.  Patch releases fix bugs
-	without changing any features, so you should normally use the
-	latest patch release for the version of Tcl that you want. 
-
-Once you've done this, change to the "unix" subdirectory if you're
-compiling under UNIX, "win" if you're compiling under Windows, or
-"mac" if you're compiling on a Macintosh.  Then follow the instructions
-in the README file in that directory for compiling Tcl, installing it,
-and running the test suite.
-
-4. Summary of changes in Tcl 8.1
---------------------------------
-
-Here are the most significant changes in Tcl 8.1.  In addition to these
-changes, there are several smaller changes and bug fixes.  See the file
-"changes" for a complete list of all changes.
-
-    1. Internationalization. Tcl has undergone a major revision to
-    support international character sets:
-
-    All strings in Tcl are now represented in UTF-8 instead of ASCII,
-    so that Tcl now supports the full Unicode character set.  The
-    representation of ASCII characters is unchanged (in UTF-8 anything
-    that looks like an ASCII character is an ASCII character), but
-    characters with the high-order bit set, such as those in ISO-8859,
-    are represented with multi-byte sequences, as are all Unicode
-    characters with values greater than 127.  This change does not
-    affect Tcl scripts but it does affect C code that parses strings.
-    Tcl automatically translates between UTF-8 and the normal encoding
-    for the platform during interactions with the system.
-
-    In Tcl scripts the backslash sequence \u can be used to enter
-    16-bit Unicode characters.  \o and \x generate only 8-bit
-    characters as before.
-
-    There is a new "encoding" command that allows scripts to determine
-    what encodings are available as well as to convert strings between
-    different encodings.  The fconfigure command now supports a
-    -encoding option for specifying the encoding of an open file or
-    socket.  Tcl will automatically translate between the specified
-    encoding and UTF-8 during I/O.
-
-    There are several new C APIs that support UTF-8 and various
-    encodings.  See the manual entry Utf.3 for procedures that
-    translate between Unicode and UTF-8 and manipulate UTF-8 strings.
-    See Encoding.3 for procedures that create new encodings and
-    translate between encodings.  See ToUpper.3 for procedures that
-    perform case conversions on UTF-8 strings.
-
-    2. Binary data.  Binary data is handled differently in Tcl 8.1
-    than in Tcl 8.0.  Tcl 8.1 uses the UTF-8 facilities to represent
-    binary data: the character value zero is represented with a
-    multi-byte sequence, so that (once again) strings in Tcl 8.1 never
-    contain null bytes.  This means that binary data is now accepted
-    everywhere in Tcl and Tk (in Tcl 8.0 the support for binary data
-    was incomplete).  If you have C code that needs to manipulate the
-    bytes of binary data (as opposed to just passing the data through)
-    you should use a new object type called "byte array".  See the
-    manual entry ByteArrObj.3 for information about procedures such as
-    Tcl_GetByteArrayFromObj.
-
-    3. Regular expressions.  Tcl 8.1 contains a brand new
-    implementation of regular expressions from Henry Spencer.  The
-    regular expression syntax has been greatly expanded to include
-    most of the features in Perl.  In addition, the regexp engine
-    supports Unicode and binary data.  See the doc/regexp.n manual
-    entry for more details.
-
-    4. Threads.  If configured with the --enable-threads flag, Tcl can
-    now be compiled for use in a multi-threaded application.
-    Individual threads are allowed to use one or more interpreters as
-    long as each interpreter (and any slave interpreters) is only
-    accessed by one thread.  Each thread runs its own event loop, and
-    you can post events to other threads. There are new C APIs for
-    mutexes, condition variables, and thread local storage.  See the
-    doc/Thread.3 manual entry for more details.  Tk 8.1 is not yet
-    multi-thread safe.  There is not yet support for tcl level use of
-    threading except for a test command. (Compile tcltest and try
-    testthread.)
-
-    5. Message catalog. There is a new message catalog package which makes
-    it easy to localize the strings in a script.  See the doc/msgcat.n
-    manual entry for more details.
-
-    6. Stubbs library for building extensions.  There is now a new
-    way to build extensions for Tcl.  Instead of linking with the
-    tcl shared library you can now link to a stubs library that gets
-    built in this release.  By linking with the stubs library it
-    is possible to use dynamically loaded extensions in staticlly
-    built applications.  It will also be possible for some extensions
-    to work for both Tcl 8.0 & 8.1 with out having to recompile.
-
-5. Development tools
+There are brief notes in the unix/README, win/README, and mac/README
+about compiling on these different platforms.  There is additional
+information about building Tcl from sources at
+    http://www.scriptics.com/support/howto/compile.html
+
+
+4. TclPro Development tools
 --------------------
 
 A high quality set of commercial development tools is now available to
@@ -231,10 +105,9 @@ and bytecode compiler.  Visit the Scriptics Web site at:
 
 	http://www.scriptics.com/tclpro
 
-for more information on TclPro and for a free 30-day evaluation
-download.
+for more information on TclPro and for a free evaluation download.
 
-6. Tcl newsgroup
+5. Tcl newsgroup
 ----------------
 
 There is a network news group "comp.lang.tcl" intended for the
@@ -242,7 +115,7 @@ exchange of information about Tcl, Tk, and related applications.  The
 newsgroup is a greata place to ask general information questions.  For
 bug reports, please see the "Support and bug fixes" section below.
 
-7. Tcl contributed archive
+6. Tcl contributed archive
 --------------------------
 
 Many people have created exciting packages and applications based on Tcl
@@ -253,7 +126,7 @@ in the directory "/pub/tcl".  The archive also contains several FAQ
 ("frequently asked questions") documents that provide solutions to problems
 that are commonly encountered by TCL newcomers.
 
-8. Tcl Resource Center
+7. Tcl Resource Center
 ----------------------
 
 Visit http://www.scriptics.com/resource/ to see an annotated index of
@@ -263,7 +136,7 @@ applications, binary releases, and patches.  You can also recommend
 additional URLs for the resource center using the forms labeled "Add a
 Resource".
 
-9. Mailing lists
+8. Mailing lists
 ----------------
 
 A couple of  Mailing List have been set up to discuss Macintosh or
@@ -285,8 +158,8 @@ subscribing put the line:
 	
 in the body instead (or wintcl).
 
-10. Support and bug fixes
--------------------------
+9. Support and Training
+------------------------
 
 Scriptics is very interested in receiving bug reports, patches, and
 suggestions for improvements.  We prefer that you send this
@@ -302,20 +175,6 @@ on comp.lang.tcl.  We strongly recommend that you select this option
 because someone else who reads comp.lang.tcl may be able to offer a
 solution.
 
-When reporting bugs, please provide full information about the Tcl/Tk
-version and the platform on which you are running Tcl/Tk.  Also,
-please include a short tclsh script that we can use to reproduce the
-bug.  Make sure that the script runs with a bare-bones tclsh and
-doesn't depend on any extensions or other programs, particularly those
-that exist only at your site.  Also, please include three additional
-pieces of information with the script:
-
-    (a) how do we use the script to make the problem happen (e.g.
-	what things do we click on, in what order)?
-    (b) what happens when you do these things (presumably this is
-        undesirable)?
-    (c) what did you expect to happen instead?
-
 We will log and follow-up on each bug, although we cannot promise a
 specific turn-around time.  Enhancements may take longer and may not
 happen at all unless there is widespread support for them (we're
@@ -337,59 +196,7 @@ offer Tcl/Tk training:
 
 	http://www.scriptics.com/resource/commercial/training
 
-11. Tcl version numbers
------------------------
-
-You can test the current version of Tcl by examining the
-tcl_version and tcl_patchLevel variables.  The tcl_patchLevel
-variable follows the naming rules outlined below (e.g., 8.0.5).
-The tcl_version just has the major.minor numbers in it (e.g., 8.0)
-
-Each Tcl release is identified by two numbers separated by a dot, e.g.
-6.7 or 7.0.  If a new release contains changes that are likely to break
-existing C code or Tcl scripts then the major release number increments
-and the minor number resets to zero: 6.0, 7.0, etc.  If a new release
-contains only bug fixes and compatible changes, then the minor number
-increments without changing the major number, e.g. 7.1, 7.2, etc.  If
-you have C code or Tcl scripts that work with release X.Y, then they
-should also work with any release X.Z as long as Z > Y.
-
-Alpha and beta releases have an additional suffix of the form a2 or b1.
-For example, Tcl 7.0b1 is the first beta release of Tcl version 7.0,
-Tcl 7.0b2 is the second beta release, and so on.  A beta release is an
-initial version of a new release, used to fix bugs and bad features before
-declaring the release stable.  An alpha release is like a beta release,
-except it's likely to need even more work before it's "ready for prime
-time".  New releases are normally preceded by one or more alpha and beta
-releases.  We hope that lots of people will try out the alpha and beta
-releases and report problems.  We'll make new alpha/beta releases to fix
-the problems, until eventually there is a beta release that appears to
-be stable.  Once this occurs we'll make the final release.
-
-We can't promise to maintain compatibility among alpha and beta releases.
-For example, release 7.1b2 may not be backward compatible with 7.1b1, even
-though the final 7.1 release will be backward compatible with 7.0.  This
-allows us to change new features as we find problems during beta testing.
-We'll try to minimize incompatibilities between beta releases, but if
-a major problem turns up then we'll fix it even if it introduces an
-incompatibility.  Once the official release is made then there won't
-be any more incompatibilities until the next release with a new major
-version number.
-
-(Note: This compatibility is true for Tcl scripts, but historically
-the Tcl C APIs have changed enough between releases that you may need
-to work a bit to upgrade extensions.)
-
-Patch releases now have a suffix such as ".4" or ".5".  Prior to
-version 8.0.3, patch releases had the suffix "p1" or "p2".  So, the
-8.0 release went to 8.0p1, 8.0p2, 8.0.3, 8.0.4, and 8.0.5.  The alphas
-and betas continue to use the 'a' and 'b' letters in their
-tcl_patchLevel.  Patch releases normally contain bug fixes only.  A
-patch release (e.g Tcl 8.0.5) should be completely compatible with the
-base release from which it is derived (e.g. Tcl 8.0), and you should
-normally use the highest available patch release.
-
-12. Thank You
+10. Thank You
 -------------
 
 We'd like to express our thanks to the Tcl community for all the