[Pkg-tcltk-devel] Mission Impossible

[Francesco P. Lovergine]

Folks

as current bugs show, the whole alternatives mechanism and the possibility
to allow admin to choose a Tcl/Tk version as they like is error prone.
This is not new.

It also gives the erroneous impression that Tcl/Tk versions could be safely 
changed at will. The result is bugs like 'I have X.Y installed, why I have also
Z.W installed? Please allow me to remove it'. This is wrong. None reports the
same for Python or Ruby or C/C++: for those languages you *have* to install a default, and
other versions are optional and used only in specific cases.

My proposal is dropping the alternatives and use symlink instead, as also suggested
by dato. Also, it is mandatory bugging programs that still depends on wish and 
generally enforce the policy. Maintainers have to adopt the policy or perish :-) i.e. serious bugs
should be reported against programs that still not use default Tcl/Tk (build)-dependencies
without a reason, else we will still have again the same problems 
at squeeze+1 release :-(

Gcc maintainers should also do their best to remove the expect 8.3 dependency problem
which is unacceptable. The 8.3 version is old and unmaintained, there is no 
justification to still use it. If the testing suite has problems with 8.4+ they
have to be solved (hppa? what's the issue? has anyone analyzed it?)

Comments?

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine