[Pkg-tcltk-devel] tkBLT published on sourceforge

[Ole Streicher]

Hi all (especially Sergei),

one of my Tcl/Tk packages (saods9) is originally shipped with its own
version of BLT. For Debian, I replaced this version with the Debian
provided one.

However, the official Debian version is IMO not in a good shape; for
tcl/tk 8.6 it had to be patched manually, and I am not sure whether any
maintenance is done upstream.

I discussed the stuff with the saods9 upstream author (William Joye),
and finally he decided to publish his BLT version on sourceforge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/tkblt/

He spent an enormous amount of time into porting to 8.6 (and later, he
claims), and the version supports MacOS and Windows as well without OS
specific code. It also has some extensions, which are used in saods9
(tick properties, error bars). And, most important, he will probably
maintain tkblt as long as saods9 is alive. Since DS9 is one of the
standard tools in astronomy, this may be quite long...

My question is now how we shall handle this: It is probably worth to
package tkblt (easy, since it is TEA compatible). Shall we then keep
both BLT and tkblt packages or try to migrate to the latter? And who
shall package and maintain it? I could package it; however my Tcl/Tk
experience is limited to mainly patching saods9, and I feel
uncomfortable to support the other reverse dependencies of BLT.

Best regards

Ole