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

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2009-03-02 at 21:07 -0500, Michel Salim wrote:

> 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.

Practically speaking, it sometimes works, as you can see. But it's not
officially supported. Minor version bumps - 8.4 -> 8.5, 8.5 -> 8.6 - are
allowed to (and do) break API and ABI compatibility for Tcl. Fedora's
Tcl policy explicitly requires Tcl packages install to Tcl
version-dependent directories in order to ensure that all code is run
with the Tcl minor version level it was built (or 'built') for, so I
doubt its maintainer would be in favour of symlink hacks...

> If 8.4 apps run fine on 8.5 and 8.6, perhaps we could add the
> necessary symlinks.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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