I. Building the Tcl thread extension for Windows ================================================ Thread extension supports two build options: o. MinGW builds: ---------------- The extension can be compiled under Windows using the MinGW (http://www.mingw.org) environment. You can also download the ready-to-go copy of the MinGW from the same place you've downloaded this extension. You should compile the Tcl core with MinGW first. After that, you can compile the extension by running the configure/make from this directory. You can also use the CONFIG script to do this. You might want to edit the script to match your environment and then just do: sh CONFIG This should go smoothly, once you got Tcl core compiled ok. o. Microsoft MSVC++ build: -------------------------- Files in this directory may be useful if you have not set up your TEA (i.e., MinGW) environment and you're using the MSVC++ from Micro$oft. To build the extension invoke the following command: nmake -f makefile.vc TCLDIR= You would need to give the of the Tcl distribution where tcl.h and other needed Tcl files are located. Please look into the makefile.vc file for more information. Alternatively, you can open the extension workspace and project files (thread_win.dsw and thread_win.dsp) from within the MSVC++ and press the F7 key to build the extension under the control of the MSVC IDE. II. Building optional support libraries ======================================= As of 2.6 release, this extension supports persistent shared variables. To use this functionality, you might need to download and compile some other supporting libraries. Currently, there is a simple implementation of shared variable persistency built atop of popular GNU Gdbm package. You can obtain the latest version of the Gdbm from: http://www.gnu.org/software/gdbm/gdbm.html. For the impatient, there are Windows ports of GNU Gdbm found on various places on the Internet. The easiest way to start is to go to the GnuWin32 project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32 and fetch yourself a compiled GNU Gdbm DLL. -EOF-