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

[Marcela Maslanova]

Michel Salim wrote:
> 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?
>>
Me.
>> 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.
> 
You are joking right? Tcl 8.5 and 8.4 have a lot of differences. The 
worst of them is #483836 which can be hardly fixed. Tcl has released 
8.6b1 which won't be in F-11 for sure. I'm waiting for stable release. 
The list of dependencies could be found here: 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/tcl8.5. Details about tcl 
versions could be found here: http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/choose.html
> If 8.4 apps run fine on 8.5 and 8.6, perhaps we could add the
> necessary symlinks.
> 
> Thanks,
> 

Regards,
-- 
Marcela Mašláňová
BaseOS team Brno