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

[Adam Williamson]

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.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net