Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk, Third Edition

Summary of Package Loading

The basic structure of package loading works like this:

• An application does a package require command. If the package is already loaded, the command just returns the version number of the already loaded package. If is not loaded, the following steps occur.

• The package facility checks to see if it knows about the package. If it does, then it runs the Tcl scripts registered with the package ifneeded command. These commands either load the package or set it up to be loaded automatically when its commands are first used.

• If the package is unknown, the tclPkgUnknown procedure is called to find it. Actually, you can specify what procedure to call to do the lookup with the package unknown command, but the standard one is tclPkgUnknown ...