Trimming the Quill: Some Development Notes

I’ve been continuing to put a lot of time into Quill, a build system for Tcl software projects (and so not into my Clojure project).

I’ve gotten two significant pieces of feedback about Quill so far. One fellow mentioned that he’d like to try it, but Quill requires that you be using TCL v8.6, and he’s still using TCL v8.5 (which is not at all unreasonable). Consequently, my focus for Quill 0.2.0 is making Quill work with whatever version of TCL you happen to have installed.

Second, I do my development on a Mac, but I’m writing Quill to be cross-platform for Mac, Linux, and Windows. The difficult is that while I’m familiar with those platforms I don’t have them handy to test with. I asked for help; and I’d like to very much thank Stephan Effelsberg, whom I have never met in person, and whom I know nothing about, except that he’s been extremely helpful. He’s found a number of Windows-related bugs, and done some legwork for me that I’m going to find quite useful in the coming months.

Finally, I thought I should explain the name of the software. A “quill” is a kind of pen, of course; you use a quill for writing, for being creative. But in addition, one of the common ways of pronouncing “TCL” is “tickle”; and so feathers have been associated with TCL for rather a long time. Hence, Quill.