Can one "reload" a package?

Hi folks,
Thanks in advance for any insight you could
give on this problem. I hope that this may be
of interest to others on the list as well.

I have an application which support plugins.
These plugins can be reloaded at any time
and their state is preserved in the "core" application.
This allows me to actively develop a plugin
and to test the results of any changes and compare
it to the previous version, without restarting
the main application.

So now I'm beginning to push the core application
beyond it's original intent,
and I figure the best way to do this is to give
it the power and scriptability that Tcl provides.
Ideally, I'd like to make each plugin a Tcl Package,
and then be able to ask for the core application
to reload a package if I modify it.

Looking at the "load" command doc, it looks like
unloading is impossible. Is anyone aware of an alternative
method that I can use to get this effect?

The way I do it in C is to have all the plugins dynamically
loadable shared libraries, which register themselves and the
commands they provide (a la Tcl Packages I guess.) But in C,
I can just close the library, deregister the commands, and reopen
the new one.

Any help, comments, and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Sam.
Received on Sun Apr 30 02:25:52 2006