Tcl/Tk plans for Squeeze
Hi RMs (and sorry for the delay in presenting this plan about Tcl/Tk).
We - the Debian Tcl/Tk team http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianTclTk -
are here defining a couple of release goals for Tcl/Tk in Squeeze.
Currently we have three different releases of Tcl/Tk: 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5
with major differences among them (e.g. 8.3 is not thread-enabled, 8.5
has a new theme-enabled Tk, etc.). A new pre-release version 8.6
is already in experimental, too.
This is a mess we need to reduce.
Since Lenny we also adopted, as wide as possible, a new policy:
http://pkg-tcltk.alioth.debian.org/tcltk-policy.html/
and a default version for Tcl/Tk. Many packages are now using the current
default Tcl/Tk version (8.4). It is time to move forward and adopt 8.5
- which is the current reference release - as the new default for
Squeeze. In many cases this will require only a binNMU of tcl-dev/tk-dev
reverse build-dependencies to obtain the result. Some packages still
needs to be converted to a non-versioned dependency if possible, and
this would be the perfect moment to do that.
Dropping 8.3 will require migrating old strict rev-dep packages
to the new policy and possibly patching for using a modern Tcl (default
or 8.4 at least). Eventually, some packages will be dropped, because too ancient.
Let them to go.
We will start with setting 8.5 as default in experimental, and mass-bug
filing all interested maintainers to ask them verifying their packages.
In some cases NMUs could be promoted by us.
A preliminary list of interested packages (it needs to be purged of already
up-to-date packages and indirects) is here:
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianTclTk/UpgradeDefaultTclTkTo85
More information will come in the next days/weeks.
--
Francesco P. Lovergine
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