Comment 15 for bug 995445

@Atheg:

(Note that I am totally guessing about this, and all of the following may be less than helpful)

AFAIK, installing tcl8.4 doesn't roll back anything. I just checked my system, and I now have both 8.4 and 8.5 installed where I only had 8.5 before. I don't know if this presents any problems as I never explicitly use TCL myself and know little about it. However:

I just tried this in a terminal:

me@precise:~$ tclsh
%
%
% exit
me@precise:~$ tclsh8.4
%
%
%
% exit
me@precise:~$ tclsh8.5
%
%
%
%
% exit
me@precise:~$

So I can explicitly call up either version of tclsh. They are both installed and working. I don't know how to tell which one comes up when I just type tclsh.

The idea of doing
   sudo apt-get install tcl8.4
to resolve the problem was just an attempt to make a single error message go away, and see what happens after that. As it turns out, it appears to have completely fixed the problem. But it is just a workaround, and I don't know if it will negatively impact anything else you are doing. Somebody more expert on the use of TCL should chime in on this.

The error message was coming from a script called gpsmanshp.postinst that is explicitly referring to tclsh8.4, a package that is not installed on a default Precise installation (and there is apparently no dependency listed with gpsmanshp, so it is not automatically installed when gpsmanshp is). Perhaps manually editing that script (replacing 8.4 with 8.5 in one line) would also fix the problem, but I haven't tested that and don't know what ripple effects that would have on anything else, if any.

It has been over a month since I tried that fix, and it doesn't seem to have hurt anything. It did make an extremely annoying recurring error message go away. And it did complete the installation (I think!) of gpsmanshp, a package that I know virtually nothing about and haven't even had time to look at since then.