Re: heads up: tcl and tk 8.5

[Michael Thomas <wart kobold org>]

Marcela Maslanova wrote:
> New tcl and tk 8.5 was released. I'd like to push it to rawhide as soon
> as possible. The list of dependent packages could be found in this
> draft: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MarcelaMaslanova/Draft/tcl8.5
> The maintainers of dependent packages should fix them according to
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/Tcl

One of the changes that packagers need to be aware of (also described in
the proposed Tcl packaging guidelines) is that we are adding a patch to
Tcl/Tk 8.5 to limit the directories where extensions can be installed.
Currently Tcl allows extensions to be installed in /usr/lib and
/usr/lib64, and will perform a time-consuming search through all
subdirectories to find extensions.

The 'restricted auto_path' patch that we are adding will limit the
search to %{_libdir}/tcl8.5 and %{_datadir}/tcl8.5.  This greatly
improves the startup time for most Tcl applications.  However, it does
require that maintainers of Tcl extension packages make some changes to
ensure that the extensions get installed into %{_libdir}/tcl8.5 (or
%{_datadir}/tcl8.5) instead of %{_libdir} (or %{_datadir}).  I will be
happy to help out any maintainers that want help with this change.

--Wart