[Pkg-tcltk-devel] Questions about backporting tcltk8.6; tdbc, drivers.

[Konstantin Khomoutov]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:12:42 +0200
tomas at tuxteam.de wrote:

> I have a couple of questions. I'm trying to backport tcl, tk 8.6 from
> unstable to stable (especially the pressence of tdbc makes it
> attractive). So far it seems to compile without problems (vanilla
> i386, Lenny). Now my questions:
> 
>  - are there any plans to offer Lenny or Squeeze backports of 8.6?
> 
>  - has anyone advice about how to get the tdbc drivers built? (the
>    source package I tried: tcl8.6_8.6.0~b1 comes without them)

After consulting with Sergei Golovan, I have decided to start packaging
TDBC as a set of packages separate from tcl8.6 itself (in particular,
I am personally interested in having MySQL and ODBC backends).
The ITP bug with some details about this packaging is available at [1].

The packaging is not finished yet.

I have somewhat uneasy feeling about this package, as there is no clear
idea yet about how TDBC will be distributed when 8.6.0 comes out.
TDBC is being developed using its own schedule, independent from Tcl
itself, and is only synchronised with Tcl at its alpha- and
beta-releases (Tcl 8.6 has no stable release yet). Hence I have decided
to package TDBC's own tarball, and things may get complicated if
upstream folks will decide to actually bundle TDBC into the Tcl's
tarball. This issue has not been discussed with upstream yet but I
intend to sort this out.

The current consensus between me and Sergei is to disable building
of TDBC stuff packaged in the core Tcl tarball and keep TDBC separate
for now.

As to backporting -- I, personally, see no real merit of backporting
8.6 to Lenny for a number of reasons (it's still beta, version in
experimental is obsolete compared to upstream, working DB libraries are
available outside of TDBC etc) but anyway since I'm not a DD I have no
real say here.

When TDBC is packaged and Tcl 8.6 is re-packaged to exclude building of
tcl8.6-tdbc, you will be able to backport both source packages to Lenny
yourself if you want to; for stuff related to Tcl it is not really
complicated anyway.

1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/07/msg00040.html