I’ve been spending the holidays to upgrade some of my own servers. One of them is the Sguil server I use. Until now it ran Debian Squeeze. On Debian Squeeze you could use tcl8.3, which has threading disabled. For Sguil tcl threading needs to be disabled:

ERROR: This version of tcl was compile with threading enabled. Sguil is NOT compatible with threading.

This is a compile time option in TCL, and the Debian Wheezy packages have it enabled by default. Here are the steps to create your own tcl deb with threading disabled:

# apt-get install dpkg-dev
# apt-get install devscripts

Get the tcl8.5 source package and build deps:

# apt-get source tcl8.5
# apt-get build-dep tcl8.5
# cd tcl8.5-8.5.11/

Next, edit the debian/rules file to disable threading. Remove the line:

                      --enable-threads \

Then, build the package:

# debuild -us -uc

And finally install the package:

# cd ..
# dpkg -i ../tcl8.5_8.5.11-2_amd64.deb

I followed this guide here at Debian Administration. It has some more detail on rebuilding debs.