[Pkg-tcltk-devel] tkBLT published on sourceforge

[Sergei Golovan]

Hi Ole,

On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Ole Streicher <olebole at debian.org> wrote:
> 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.

True, there's no any maintenance upstream, and even if the blt package
works fairly well with tk8.6 it'd certainly be better to switch to actually
maintained code.

>
> 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...

Good to know that.

>
> 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.

I'll look into tkblt and see if it can be used as a replacement for the current
blt package. There aren't too many reverse dependencies, it's just python-tk
which bothers me a bit. I think that if tkblt can replace the current blt then
I'll maintain it in Debian. Thank you for pointing me!

Cheers!
-- 
Sergei Golovan