Soar 7.1 (Proposed)

In order to port Soar to the WIN32 platform, it was necessary to upgrade it to Tcl 7.6/Tk 4.2. In the process, I discovered dynamically loadable Tcl extensions, and it became apparent that this might be a neat way to do Soar across all platforms.

I'd like to propose that this is "the way we should release Soar". From one code base, it will allow us to support a wide a variety of platforms, and will let us take advantage of the latest and greatest functionality available in the Tcl and Tk world. Let me know what you think.

• CHANGES. The CHANGES file distributed with the proposed Soar 7.1 release. Contains the "nuggets and lumps" of the approach, as well the nuts and bolts of as "what this would mean" for Soar hackers. This version of the file is a little bit more current than the file included with the releases, just because I'm dumping bugs, problems, etc. here for now.

• soar-7.1.0-src.tar.gz. The full source code of the release. So far, I've successfully compiled and installed this on SunOS, IRIX, and Linux. Unfortunately, I've trashed the old autoconf stuff and need to update that before it'll be as easy to install this release as it is to install Soar 7.0.4. Until then, you can peruse Install.Unix, which contains rough instructions for getting stuff up and running under UNIX.

• soar-7.1.0-mac-ppc.sea.hqx. The binaries for the Power PC Macintosh port. Install.Macintosh contains installation instructions, just in case you want to see what you're getting in to. Of course, if people like it, we'll figure out how to do it through a bona fide installer program.

• soar-7.1.0-mac-68k.sea.hqx. The binaries for the 68k Macintosh port. Installation as above.

• soar-7.1.0-win32.zip. The binaries for the Win32 (Windows 95, Windows NT, and possibly even Windows 3.1 with Win32s installed, but I haven't tested that). Install.Windows contains installation instructions until we figure out how to use a real installer.

  Note that I think that the Win32 binary release of Tcl 7.6/Tk 4.2 is a bad build. Here's a README file that describes the basic problem, and a patch that contains a version rebuilt with VC++ 4.2.

• Tcl/Tk Home Page. From which you can download Tcl 7.6p2 and Tk 4.2p2, which are required to run Soar. Note that for Windows and Mac, you don't need the source releases: just the compiled distributions. For UNIX, you'll need to compile everything yourself, so you do need the source distributions.

• AAAI_97_Soar_Tut-Mac.sea.hqx. (4.1 Mb) A first cut at the AAAI 97 Soar Tutorial distribtuion for the Macintosh. Contains the "Eaters" demo. This is a BinHex 4.0 self-extracting archive that includes the Tcl/Tk binary distribution and the binary distributions for both the 68K and Power PC Macs.

Enjoy!

Last Modified May 26, 1997.