Tcl 8.6 (was Re: Ready for new RPM version?)

[Michel Salim]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-03-01 at 05:26 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> > Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> >> You can probably do something very similar with a different tag in Koji.
>> >>   That's how Python 2.6 was introduced in rawhide. Fedora maintainers
>> >> should be using this feature in this build system more often. Openssl
>> >> hassles could have been avoided by using it as well for example.
>> >
>> > So can we get Tcl/Tk 8.6 into F11 even if it's late? :-)
>>
>> Could be depending on how disruptive it is.
>
> It doesn't seem to have been a big issue for MDV. Most of the trouble I
> had was in converting things to the new (for MDV) Tcl packaging policy I
> implemented at the same time - which is basically the Fedora policy,
> because I liked the look of it.
>
> In terms of pure 8.5 -> 8.6 issues, there weren't many, 99% of them
> really being just one issue (the use of interp->result is now disallowed
> by default, and quite a lot of Tcl code uses this, even though it's been
> officially deprecated and not recommended for like a decade). It's
> generally very easy for a coder to fix (so not always for me :>), I
> upstreamed fixes in quite a few apps, for apps which are dead upstream
> but in MDV you can pull my patches from MDV SVN, and in the worst case,
> you can allow its use by adding a #define at the top of the source file
> concerned (I had to do this in a few packages where I couldn't grok the
> 'right' way to fix the code).
>
> So I would say it would be possible. Whether it's desirable for Fedora,
> I don't really know. It may not be a good idea to do it this late, for a
> release which is already pretty stuffed with features. Who's the Tcl/Tk
> maintainer?
>
> Oh, worth noting that probably the biggest Tcl-using app is amsn. You
> can patch amsn 0.97.2 to more or less work with 8.6, but it still had a
> few issues. In the end I just bumped MDV to current SVN amsn instead, on
> the recommendation of upstream, which has rather a lot of nice new
> features anyway.

Speaking of Tcl/Tk, does anyone know whether Tcl 8.6 is backward
compatible with 8.5? From my experience, 8.5 *appears* to be backward
compatible with 8.4: a graphics library for this Scheme dialect I use,
Chez, comes as a binary compiled against Tk 8.4, and symlinking gets
it to run just fine.

If 8.4 apps run fine on 8.5 and 8.6, perhaps we could add the
necessary symlinks.

Thanks,

-- 
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