RT firmwares: TCL interpreter - keep it or lose it?

Polls and the resulting discussions.

Do you wish to see the TCL interpreter in future RT firmwares?

No, I never use it / can live without it
33
89%
Yes, I need it!
4
11%
 
Total votes: 37
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Neo
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RT firmwares: TCL interpreter - keep it or lose it?

Post by Neo » Sat Sep 22, 2007 2:09 pm

The RouterTech development team would like to know whether, you, the users of our firmwares, would like to keep the TCL interpreter in future firmware releases. It takes up a considerable amount of space in the router's memory - memory which could be freed up for something else (e.g. a bigger minix partition :) ). If you don't know what the TCL interpreter is then you probably don't need it ;)

We would be grateful if you could make your opinion known and vote below :)
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Post by mstombs » Sat Sep 22, 2007 6:37 pm

I tested it and got it to print "hello world", not touched it since - bash script seems to do all I have need of.
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Post by Shotokan101 » Sat Sep 22, 2007 7:25 pm

I never really intended to use it - I just thought tat it might give developers a bit more flexibility to provide additional fnctionality that we could all benefit from. :?
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Post by thechief » Wed Jan 02, 2008 3:37 pm

Judging from the deluge of responses (:roll:) it seems that the feature is not being used, and so it will be removed from future firmware releases. Anyone who needs it thereafter will have to stick with v2.3 ...
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Post by hyperair » Wed Jan 02, 2008 3:45 pm

Honestly I was of the opinion that TCL was a rather bad choice for a scripting language interpreter. I mean I know quite a few languages, but TCL's not one of them. In fact, I have absolutely no intention of learning TCL. So why not replace it with something more common/popular? Perhaps Perl or PHP or Python? Also I wouldn't mind if "ps" gave more options.
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Post by thechief » Wed Jan 02, 2008 4:14 pm

hyperair wrote:Honestly I was of the opinion that TCL was a rather bad choice for a scripting language interpreter. I mean I know quite a few languages, but TCL's not one of them. In fact, I have absolutely no intention of learning TCL. So why not replace it with something more common/popular? Perhaps Perl or PHP or Python?
Space. If we had 256mb of flash memory instead of 4mb, I could add Perl, PHP, Python, or even a C compiler.
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Post by thechief » Wed Jan 02, 2008 4:20 pm

hyperair wrote:I wouldn't mind if "ps" gave more options.
"ps" is a Busybox applet., so I am afraid no one will be getting any more options out of it. You could of course try building the full ps utility from source - but I doubt it would be worth the space that it would take out of your flash memory.
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Post by hyperair » Wed Jan 02, 2008 4:25 pm

thechief wrote:
hyperair wrote:I wouldn't mind if "ps" gave more options.
"ps" is a Busybox applet., so I am afraid no one will be getting any more options out of it. You could of course try building the full ps utility from source - but I doubt it would be worth the space that it would take out of your flash memory.
Figures. I didn't think they needed THAT much space though. Looks like they do eh?
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Post by thechief » Wed Jan 02, 2008 5:41 pm

Have you tried building any of these (plus all dependencies)? You would be surprised at the space required.

PS: and 4mb is not a lot to fit a Linux distro and a host of other things into.
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Post by hyperair » Wed Jan 02, 2008 5:44 pm

Agreed. Mine's already reaching 8GB, but then again I've got GNOME and KDE4 installed. =P Not to mention Perl, Python, Apache2, among other space-consuming stuff.
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Post by thechief » Wed Jan 02, 2008 8:39 pm

If you look in the "repository" package we released a few weeks ago, you will see a few examples. "Microperl" for example compiles to circa 1.5mb. So does openvpn. So even with the best will in the world, it is impossible to add openvpn or microperl to a firmware - how much less a full blown perl (or python, or php). Bash is 1mb, etc., etc.
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Post by Neo » Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:09 pm

thechief wrote:If you look in the "repository" package we released a few weeks ago, you will see a few examples.
Here's the link for anyone interested: viewtopic.php?t=1602 :)
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I don't know if I'm too late to suggest this but...

Post by jimp » Thu Jan 03, 2008 11:38 pm

What I would like to see instead of TCL is a small tftp server set up to serve files from a share on another machine on the network. Ideally it would be configurable from a page on the RT admin pages so you could set up which cifs share (or something) to use + username + password too I suppose. Having the tftp server on the same box as the DHCP server can be very handy, but I do wonder whether it would fit...
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Post by thechief » Fri Jan 04, 2008 9:19 pm

I am not sure why using cifs requires an ftp server running on the router.
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Post by Shotokan101 » Fri Jan 04, 2008 9:27 pm

thechief wrote:I am not sure why using cifs requires an ftp server running on the router.
Surely it doesn't ? it would be a Samba equivalent wouldn't it ?
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