How to use the Tcl binding so cleanup works

[Michael Schlenker]

The current Tcl binding has problems with cleanup, sometimes the destructor does not get called and other nuisances.

I did some small experiments with the binding and found, that the destructor gets called in some cases and not in others:

This works:

xapian::WritableDatabase xapiandb testdir $::xapian::DB_CREATE_OR_OVERWRITE
rename xapiandb ""

This seems it does not:

xapian::WritableDatabase xapiandb testdir $::xapian::DB_CREATE_OR_OVERWRITE
set db xapiandb
$db -delete

neither does this

set db [xapian::WritableDatabase xapiandb testdir $::xapian::DB_CREATE_OR_OVERWRITE]
$db -delete

or this:

set db [xapian::WritableDatabase xapiandb testdir $::xapian::DB_CREATE_OR_OVERWRITE]
rename $db ""

I'm not sure if it is a problem with the SWIG wrapping, but thing there are some subtle problems somewhere in there.

Michael

[Olly Betts]

It sounds like something isn't quite right inside SWIG, but I don't think I'm qualified to investigate it, since I don't know tcl or the inside of SWIG,

I've added your observations to the tcl bindings documentation, so at least people can work around this problem.

[Olly Betts]

(wiki format description and fix typo: "constructor"->"destructor")

[Olly Betts]

As of Xapian 1.1.0, using WritableDatabase's close method is a good way to avoid this whole issue. I've added a note about this to the Tcl8 docs in r14125 (for 1.1.5), and I'm going to close this ticket now - I think we've addressed this as well as we easily can.