[Pkg-tcltk-devel] Bug#628436: Bug#628436: Please disallow tclsh8.4 as an alternative for the tclsh command

[Sergei Golovan]

Hi Jonathan!

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 2:20 AM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It would be convenient if scripts could assume the tclsh command and
> virtual package provide tclsh8.5 or newer as long as tcltk-defaults is
> up to date, like below.

I don't want to package different Tcl/Tk versions differently. Any
inconsistency is bad for users. So, either all of them should provide
alternatives to tclsh and wish or none of them, in which case the only
symlinks to tclsh and wish would be in the tcl and tk packages. In the
latter case we need to update the policy and remove virtual packages
tclsh and wish, which will cause quite a bit of fixing bugs. And I
don't know what to do with extensions which work with any Tcl/Tk
version (so, I don't want them to require 'tcl'), but come with
examples with "#! /usr/bin/tclsh".

>
> My only worry would be that some package might be using "Depends:
> tcl8.4" and expecting the tclsh command to work, when they should have
> been using "Depends: tcl (>= 8.4)".  If some user does not have tcl
> from tcltk-defaults or tcl8.[56] installed for some other reason, the
> tclsh command would go away --- no good.  But I don't think that's a
> big risk.

It's fairly simple to look through the archive and find if there's
such packages. It's not too late to fix them.

Cheers!
-- 
Sergei Golovan