As of early 2002, a new domain called tcl.tk came into existence, originating from an island in the Pacific called "Tokelau". In fact, it was donated to "the Tcl community" (insert hand-waving motion) - via John Ousterhout, that is [explain...].
Drumroll...In a nutshell, http://tcl.tk
is poised to become the new center of the Tcl/Tk universe.As it stands today (end Feb 2k2), the following urls appear functional:- http://tcl.tk - points to http://tcl.activestate.com
- http://www.tcl.tk - points to http://tcl.activestate.com
- http://wiki.tcl.tk - this wiki
- any others? ...
Here is a proposal for a policy which may help make tcl.tk a long lasting proposition, regardless of what happens with people, organizations, and domains over time (change is inevitable, if you wait long enough):
- point to, mention, promote, shout, embrace, extend, and plaster urls of the form http://something.tcl.tk as much as possible from now on
- for every url http://foo.tcl.tk, define a PURL (see [1]) of the form http://purl.org/tcl/foo/ which redirects to the same spot
- for completeness, also define http://purl.org/tcl/foo (i.e. without the trailing slash) to avoid an artifact of purls
- for convenience, http://www.tcl.tk/ ought probably be made to redirect to http://tcl.tk/ (or vice-versa)
- in code that relies on URLs, use the PURL variant at all times, i.e. do not put "http://foo.tcl.tk/bar" in the code, but "http://purl.org/tcl/foo/bar"
- inversely, do not mention purls as main locations in docs and other textual/verbal contexts to avoid the "purl? isn't that another language?" confusion
- tcl.tk is cute ... it'll stick, like instant glue
- if tcl.tk breaks down (for technical, political, or financial reasons), code will continue to work
- purls can be managed by a varying group of people, and instantly adjusted
- given that the purl.org site is run by a large but non-commercial entity, the chances of it ever going away are quite slim
- purls never go away (the worst that can happen is that they redirect to a wrong or missing spot, but this can be fixed instantly through the web by any of the maintainers)
- the *.tk setup has yet to prove itself in terms of stability and performance - having the purls becomes insurance against any unforeseen troubles
as the MAIN root for this wiki and all pages in it...(Note: mini.net/tcl is not going to go away for quite some time, but if wiki.tcl.tk becomes the new hip way of referring to the wiki, I'll adjust the logic so it shows up that way as much as possible in the wiki itself as well -jcw) [And some time during 2008 or 2009, mini.net went away... RIP]
There is a top-level .tk domain
