Tcl Meetup, 2022-03-09
In attendance: [B. C. Harder%|%Brad Harder], [Brian Griffin], [dgp%|%dgp], [Harald Oehlmann], [Hypnotoad], [Jan Nijtmans], [PYK%|%Poor Yorick], [D. Richard Hipp%|%Richard Hipp], [Schelte Bron], [Steve Huntley], [Andreas Kupries], [Rolf Ade], and others.
** Unicode **
Summary of surrogate pair issue: 8.6 always had issues handling them. That handling changed around 8.6.10 (?) to be like 8.7. [string length] of certain Unicode scalar values is 2, as documented in TIP 542. [string length] of any single Unicode code point will be 1 in 9.0.
Jan Nijtmans suggested releasing 8.7 and 9.0 at the same time
Jan and Don discussed Tcl_UniCharToUtf, which maintains some state information
about the string in the output buffer so that when it encounters a surrogate
pair, it can wait to output a character until it encounters the second half of the
pair, even though it only takes one character as an argument each time it is called.
Tcl_UniCharToUtf is used throughout the C sources, so teasing the ad-hoc utf-16
encode/decoder from Tcl will be a chore.
Brian mentioned that 8.7 crashed when he pasted an emoji into a text widget.
Jan mentsaioned that only a little more work to be done on 8.7/9.0's Unicode issues to make them ready for a new release. In particular he mentioned [TIP]s 573, 601, 607 and 619.
The fossil branch https://core.tcl-lang.org/tk/timeline?r=glyph_indexing_2 was mentioned as a case of a workaround Tk requires to resolve some current Unicode issues, which would presumably be made unnecessary by the above TIPs.
** Release Issues **
Don responded to requests for feedback on how people could lighten his workload in preparing new releases. He mentioned:
* Continued regular meetings
* Testing and feedback about the condition of packages bundled with the release, such as [SQLite], [ITcl], etc.
* Compilation of information about a new release to turn into a document such as the following for Tcl 8.6: [http://www.tcl-lang.org/software/tcltk/8.6.html]
* Better documentation/tools which provide full details for creating a new release from scratch. The classic "make dist" command has some issues on some platforms, notably MacOS
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