tcl 8.5 alpha in fedora 7?

[Michael Thomas]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Jean-Luc Fontaine <jfontain <at> free.fr> writes:
>> Well, then there's gonna be a big problem with blt (now in extras, a
>> graphical library) which is far from ready to compile against tcl-8.5,
> 
> The strange thing is that it doesn't show up in the "broken dependencies" list, 
> so RPM thinks the version built against 8.4 is still going to run (there's no 
> dependency on the versioned soname). I don't know whether that's true.

It's likely compiled against the Tcl stubs library, which is supposed to 
allow upgrades to the core Tcl without the need to rebuild the extension 
itself.  The staticly linked stubs library can switch from the dynamic 
libtlc8.4.so to libtcl8.5.so without needing to recompile the extension.
http://wiki.tcl.tk/285

> itcl, itk and iwidgets are in a similar situation, they don't seem to depend on 
> libtcl8.4.so either for some reason, so I have no idea if they actually need a 
> rebuilt or not.

In this case, the stubs mechanism failed because itcl tries to require 
tcl 8.4 or tcl8.5, and fails because it doesn't recognize 8.5a5 as a 
valid 8.5 version.  This is easy to fix with a rebuild if itcl/itk.  I 
don't think it's unreasonable to expect a rebuild of the extensions when 
moving from 8.4 to 8.5aX to 8.5.

Rebuilding itcl/itk with tcl8.5a5 fixes the problem for itcl, and itcl 
passes its own test suite with tcl8.5a5.  I'm submitting rebuilds for 
both itcl and itk now (iwidgets is noarch, no rebuild is necessary).

--Wart