[Swift-devel] TC File Generator

[Ben Clifford]

often the tc.data file is a mostly needless hassle, such as when pointing 
at stuff that is on the path and is installed on every site that you will 
use.

but it does contain some information that cannot be automatically 
discovered - for example I want to use version X of software package A on 
one site, and version Y of software package A on another site, and those 
packages are not in the default path.

tc.data is possibly (probably?) not the easiest way to express that (for 
users, rather than for the software to use to lookup).

for example, you could say "mogrify and convert are in ImageMagick. and to 
use ImageMagick first you need to source setup.sh in its etc directory. On 
site A, imagemagick is at /opt/ImageMagick/1.0/ and on site B it is in 
/usr and on site C it is not present".". 

without needing to require the end user to multiple out the package 
description x executable lines in tc.data

then you end up with something that looks a bit more like a multisite 
softenv, describing packages rather than individual executables.

-- http://www.hawaga.org.uk/ben/