There doesn't appear to be a summary of changes between versions 5.43,
5.44 and 5.45. Perusing the Changelog gives me the impression that
the updates are improvements and bug fixes against existing functionality.
Regardless, version 5.43 is incompatible with tcl8.5. Expect had to
be updated after TCL was updated to version 8.5.
* Fixed bug in ExpOutputProc that caused misbehavior during partial writes.
* Noted that expect_background ignores timeouts. Added to documentation.
* Patch for "mkpasswd -vo".
* Removed beta designation.
* Daniel A. Steffen <steffen@ics.mq.edu.au> provided patch for
MacOS to avoid panic-redefinition.
Changes 5.41.0:
* Simon Taylor <simon@unisolve.com.xau> provided fix for
interact -o which was completely broken by 5.40.1.
Changes 5.40.1:
* Added scroll support to official tkterm. Copied all fixes
from/to term_expect to/from tkterm.
* Kiran Madabhushi <maskiran@hotmail.xcom> encountered interact
diagnostics incorrectly pointing to expect_background. Also,
found multiple -o flags behaving unexpectedly. Added diag.
* Kristoffer Eriksson <ske@pkmab.xse> noted typo in SIMPLE code
in exp_inter.c. However, this is extremely unlikely to affect
any machines.
* Reinhard Max <max@suse.xcom> noted that "make test" failed when
run in the background. The log testcase was testing the
send_tty command. Added code in both Expect and in the test
to handle this.
Changes to the expect package since expect-5.25:
* This package is now split into two packages, tcl-expect, and
tk-expect. tcl-expect can be installed on systems without
X11 (and by extension, without tk).
* the copious expect examples and their man pages are now installed
into ${PREFIX}/share/examples/tcl/expect instead of into
${PREFIX}/bin and ${PREFIX}/man. If any of them are determined
to be worth separate use, they should be split out into a
separate package.
Changes to expect itself since expect-5.25:
** SUMMARY
Expect 5.31 now works with Tcl 8.2. Expect 5.31 does NOT work with
prior releases of Tcl. Thanks to an incredible amount of work by
Scott Stanton, Henry Spencer, Melissa Hirschl, and funding from
Scriptics for making this possible.
** NEW FEATURES
What? You mean that working with Tcl 8.2 isn't enough?????
Expect supports Tcl's new regexp engine.
Expect supports null bytes in strings directly. (You no longer have
to use the "null" keyword to send or match nulls. Of course, the
"null" keyword will continue to be supported.) Null removal (on
input) is still enabled by default since nulls are almost never
intended for end-user consumption in interactive dialogues.
** CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR (POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITIES)
The interpreter command used to exit upon eof. Now it uses "-eof
script" to control this behavior. The default behavior is to return.
(This change was required because Expect now gives control to Tcl upon
exit and Tcl waits (potentially forever) for all processes to die on
exit.) Explicit calls to interpreter are almost non-existent.
However, you should look for *implicit* calls via interact commands
with a pattern but no action. This required changes in the examples:
dislocate, dvorak, kibitz, and xkibitz.
Indirect variables can no longer start with "exp". Such variables
will be interpreted as channel names.
Old-style regexps may need conversion. If you have been protecting
regexps containing backslashes with {}, then you need to examine all
your backslashes since the new regexp engine interprets backslash
sequences (such as \n) itself. For example:
expect "\n" (works the same in Tcl 8.0 and 8.1)
expect {\n} (works differently in Tcl 8.0 and 8.1)
Scriptics has also created a new-regexp-features page which you should
read: http://www.scriptics.com/support/howto/regexp81.html. Some of
the new features allow much more efficient regexps than before. For
example, non-greedy quantifiers can replace [split] looping
constructions with a single regexp, enabling Tcl to parse very
efficiently. For the whole story, read the re_syntax man page.
The interact command's regexp matching no longer skips nulls. (I'd be
surprised if anyone misses this. At least I hope ....)
Expect's C library now reports failures in spawn's underlying exec
directly (by returning -1) rather than the way it used to (as data in
the pty). This makes user code more robust. However, it requires you
to simplify your code, alas. See the chesslib.c example.
Linking with Expect's C library no longer requires the Tcl library
(unless, of course, you make Tcl calls yourself). Tcl is still
required to build the library in the first place, however.
** CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR (SHOULD NOT CAUSE INCOMPATIBILITIES)
The match_max command now controls by bytes, not chars. This won't
cause problems unless your existing scripts are interacting using
sizeable chunks of multibyte characters. (If you don't know what I'm
talking about, ignore this.)
The Make/configure suite now corresponds to the TEA conventions (at
least in theory; the conventions are changing regularly so it's hard
to be less vague on this point). Significantly, this means that you
should be able to use the same configure flags as when compiling Tcl
or any other TEA-compatible extension. (See the INSTALL file.)
The values of special variables such as exp_spawn_id_any have changed.
(The values were never documented so you shouldn't have been using
them anyway.)
Spawn ids now appear as "exp...". (They used to be small integers.)
Do not assume that spawn ids will continue to be represented in any
particular way (other than unique strings).
** OTHER NOTES
Expect uses channels. There is an Expect channel type. It is
possible to use Tcl's channel commands, such as fconfigure, to change
the encoding. However, Expect layers its own buffering system on top
of Tcl's channel handler so don't expect intuitive behavior when using
commands such as gets and puts. Unless you know what you're doing, I
recommend manipulating the Expect channels only with the expect
commands.
Some effort was made to make Expect support threads, however it is not
complete. You can compile Expect with threads enabled but don't run
Expect in multiple threads just yet.
So much code has changed, there are bound to be bugs in dark corners.
Please let me know of such cases. The best response will come by
supplying a simple test case that can be added to Expect's test suite.
In places where the behavior of Expect was not precisely documented,
full advantage was taken to do something different :-)
Several esoteric bugs were fixed.
Although Expect itself uses Henry Spencer's new regexp engine,
Expect's C library still uses his original regexp engine.
No testing has been done of the poll and non-event subsystems. (These
are used on systems which don't support select on ptys or ttys. Some
minor work needs to be done on them (because the event subsystem was
rewritten) which I'll probably do only if anyone requests it.
Many deprecated features (deprecated for many years!) have been
removed. All such features were deprecated prior to Exploring Expect
so if that's how you learned Expect, you have nothing to worry about.
For example, Expect's getpid command predates Tcl's pid command and
it's been deprecated for, oh.... 6 years - wow! Other deprecated features
include:
expect -timestamp (flag only; behavior itself was removed years ago)
expect -iwrite (flag only; behavior occurs all the time)
expect_version (use "exp_version" command)
expect_library (use "exp_library" global variable)
interact -eof (use "eof" keyword)
interact -timeout (use "timeout" keyword)
interact -timestamp (use "clock" command)
getpid (use "pid" command)
system stty (use "stty" command)
With this release, the following are deprecated:
timestamp (use "clock" command)
debugger (use a different one; there are very nice replacements
around. Fortunately the Expect debugger is not something anyone
is wiring into their scripts, so for now, consider it on the
endangered species list. Anyone still want this debugger?)
From now on, the most current snapshots of Expect will be found in the
Scriptics CVS repository. Not all snapshots are official releases.
For more, see the ChangeLog file in the expect distribution.
