[Pkg-tcltk-devel] Some major reasons to add a Tcl/Tk 8.5 package

[Michael Schlenker]

Hi all,

I'm one of the upstream Tcllib developers, responsible for most of the
logger, ldap, asn.1 and some of the struct subpackages in tcllib. No
debian relation yet, other then having met Joey once or twice in
Oldenburg. I'm more of a SUSE/Slackware person for historical reasons.

There is one major reason to include a Tcl/Tk 8.5 package in etch, even
if the upstream is designated alpha (there are even Release Candidate
Releases for Tcl/Tk alpha packages, so don't take the alpha too
serious...). Because of the alpha state it would be good to track nearly
HEAD for this one.

The major reason is:
getting freetype/xft support for Tk
Tk 8.4 looks like crap on Linux if everything else uses freetype. 8.5 is
the first release that uses xft to do font smoothing and this won't be
backported to Tk 8.4. Many developer type users will simply install
Tcl/Tk from source to get it, but most other users will hesitate to use
anything besides the usual deb packages, so they are denied the better
looking Tk version.
This is a problem for any Tk using program like for example:
aMSN, gittk, ...

There are lots of other changes that would be worth including a Tcl 8.5
version, see for a list:
http://wiki.tcl.tk/10630

I'm not exactly sure which versions of Tcl debian includes, so some
comments:

Tcl 7.x : Thats about nine years out of date

Tcl 8.0 : Some people are stuck in the past, before unicode support
arrived, even if it is seven years old, no support, no bugfixes, no
backports, not even security fixes

Tcl 8.1/8.2: why bother?

Tcl 8.3.5 : Was released four years ago, basically an end-of-life
branch, no support, no bugfixes, no backports, not even security fixes

Tcl 8.4.x : The current stable release, since about four years, gets
current fixes and everything, most things running with 8.3 should work
with 8.4, but there were some CONST changes
(see http://wiki.tcl.tk/3669 )

Tcl 8.5.x : The current development release, designated 'alpha'. Gets
active development and adds lots of new, interesting features.


Some comments about other things:

Other shells than tclsh:
The current mood is that all shells other than tclsh are basically no
longer needed an can be replaced by trivial scripts that package require
the appropriate extra packages (examples include expect, tcl, xotclsh,
wish).

Threaded/non-threaded:
I know that debian is one of the few to use a fully thread enabled
tcl-8.4 in the default install and a non-threaded tcl-8.3. The current
mood upstream is to make thread-enabled the default sometime in the
(near) future, so debian should be well prepared.
Many well behaved packages can use --enable-threads during compile time
to include the mutexes and locks for working in a threaded environment,
but stay loadable without changes in non-thread enabled builds. Also,
STUBS enabled packages compiled with --enable-thread may be used with
all Tcl versions from 8.1 to 8.5 without changes.


Michael