tcl 8.5 alpha in fedora 7?

[Wart]

jfontain at free.fr wrote:
> Quoting Michael Thomas <wart at kobold.org>:
> 
> 
>> Yes, I'm willing to work on it.  I maintain almost 20 other Tcl
>> extensions, so I wouldn't be surprised to run into the same problems in
>> multiple places.
> 
> And thank you very much indeed for your work. Please let us know how your
> packages go against tcl 8.5 alpha so we can decide whether to stick with 8.4.14
> or not.

I've noticed a couple of things, none of which seem very major:

- Packages built against the Tcl stub library don't load properly with 
Tcl 8.5a5.  They need to be rebuilt (BLT, itcl/itk)

- If the package version declared in pkgIndex.tcl does not match the 
version from the 'package provide' statement in the .tcl file providing 
the package, then 'package require foo' will fail.  Under Tcl 8.4, this 
situation would silently succeed.  Of course, if the version in 
pkgIndex.tcl doesn't match the version in the actual .tcl file, then 
it's a bug that should be fixed anyway (tclsoap, tclxml)

- tk8.5a5 purportedly includes the tile extension, so that won't have to 
be maintained as a separate extension anymore.  ditto for tcldict being 
included in tcl 8.5a5.

- tbcload, and likely the tclpro compiler, haven't been updated with the 
bytecode changes in Tcl 8.5.  It's unclear if this will ever happen, 
unfortunately, due to lack of effort.  This doesn't seem to affect the 
tclpro debugger and syntax checker, so it may not be much of a loss.

There may be other runtime issues that we haven't discovered yet, but I 
think we ought to proceed with tcl 8.5a5 for now to help uncover and fix 
them so that we can have this long awaited Tcl update for F7.

--Wart