Hi Debian fellows The Tcl/Tk team announced in October [1] that some work is happening off-stage about Tcl/Tk versions and their reverse dependencies. A new policy document is currently available [2] whose aim is introducing some order and improvements in the current Tcl/Tk status. We are now moving forward by defining a few release goals for Lenny, which are of interest for the release team and all involved maintainers and packages. Our goals in descending order of priority are: [A] Removing /usr/lib in $auto_path [3]. That has been already announced in the past message with motivations for that, and experimental packages are available in experimental for testing. We are going to release a non-/usr/lib Tcl/Tk in unstable and preparing a few NMUs for packages which need fixed pkgIndex.tcl for that. That will happen as soon as possible. A dedicated page about tasks and packages involved in the transition is [4] for all interested parties. [B] Removing Tcl/Tk 8.3, which is largely obsolete since years, and not supported upstream. That will make security teams happy. A few packages need to depend on Tcl/Tk 8.4 and testing, a few main extensions will need changes as well and all that will/could propagate to other packages. A dedicated wiki page listing the packages involved in 8.3 removing is available [5]. Some packages could need specific patches in order to work with a current version of Tcl/Tk, but that should be not the general case. If a patch cannot be provided (dead upstream, none is able to provide a suitable patch, etc) the interested package will be proposed for removal because obsolete. That is surely the case of some old/deprecated extensions. [C] Making the recently released Tcl/Tk 8.5 the default package in Lenny. Default packages are a recent concept introduced in the last months in order to improve the status of the Tcl/Tk dependencies building by allowing bin-NMUs when ever needed. We would have the long waited 8.5 as default package in the next release. References ========== [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/10/msg00008.html [2] http://pkg-tcltk.alioth.debian.org/tcltk-policy.html/ [3] http://pkg-tcltk.alioth.debian.org/tcltk-policy.html/ch-tcltk.html#s-paths [4] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianTclTk/UsrLibTransition [5] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianTclTk/TclTk83Removal -- Francesco Lovergine (in behalf of the Tcl/Tk team)
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