[Pkg-tcltk-devel] Tdbc package

[Konstantin Khomoutov]

On Sat, 5 Jan 2013 14:38:59 +0000
"Massimo Manghi" <mxmanghi at apache.org> wrote:

> With the release of Tcl8.6 I thought also tdbc would have made into
> sid, either as part of the core language or as a separate package. I
> realized instead the only tdbc package is for experimental and only
> for hppa (!). What is preventing tdbc from entering Debian unstable?

Well, this is weird.

I'm the prospective maintainer of tdbc in Debian (as I filed an ITP bug
and prepared a debianization for it [1]), and I do not recall I asked
anyone to upload tdbc anywhere.

The development of this package has been dormant for almost a year for
two reasons:

1) The real status of TDBC's upstream packaging was not clear: TDBC is
   (or was?) being developed in a separate repository but has been
   considered a part of a prospective official source tarball of
   Tcl 8.6.  Still, TDBC had its own releases, independent of the Tcl's
   release schedule, so that's what I packaged, extracting tarballs of
   those releases from the TDBC's Fossil repo.  I started a discussion
   about this issue [2]; several TCT members participated, but the
   results were inconclusive.

   Actually, in the end upstream made a wise decision and distributes
   [3] both full "all inclusive" tarball and a "core" tarball plus a set
   of tarballs of all components which are not core but considered
   a part of the Tcl proper.  This enables Sergei to package just the
   Tcl's core as he always did and let the TDBC maintainer (me
   currently) package my own stuff separately.

2) I wanted to get certain patches [*] upstream before really moving
   further.  The chief TDBC developer (Kevin Kenny) was generally
   positive about them and evaluated my preliminary patches I sent him,
   but AFAIK they never landed in his TDBC's Fossil repository,
   and our discussion about these changes died out.  To be honest, I now
   cannot even find where is my playground for those features (but I
   will try harder).

Current status of my debianization is as follows.  I skipped several
TDBC releases, and my packaging is not yet adapted to the way upstream
decided to distribute TDBC.  My proposed patches have supposedly not
been included as well.

I think that my next step will be to update my packaging to the
released versions of the TDBC-related tarballs released as parts of 8.6
and ask Sergei to upload the results to unstable.

[*] One of up-front design decisions for TDBC was to make it highly
    dynamic and not depending on particular versions of DBMS client
    libraries actually installed in the system (like libmysql.so etc).
    This is a wise idea as it enables convenient usage of TDBC in
    starkits.  But here in Debian we do not need this: this feature
    both complicates matters for packagers (me) and might break at
    runtime under certain circumstances as TDBC tries a series of
    guesses when it attempts to dlopen() a DBMS client library and
    might inadvertently pull a version separately installed by the
    user.  Hence I proposed a solution which would select at compile
    time either the "classic" framework as originally implemented in
    TDBC or a more rigid one which would just "normally" link to DBMS
    client libraries.

1. http://bugs.debian.org/587893
2. http://code.activestate.com/lists/tcl-core/9566/
3. http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl/files/Tcl/8.6.0/