Aug 22 Tcl Meetup notes

Tcl Meetup 2022-08-09

Topics

• Tcl 8.7. Again! But what *concrete* steps can be taken to move it forward to an actual release?

dkf - 2022-08-09 14:51:25

Channel encoding issues: errors should be selectable, not on default. Three stratgies:

1. Error on invalid
2. Replacement on invalid
3. Guess

Choose with chan configure?

dkf - 2022-08-09 16:03:45

There was agreement (after discussion) that we should have a deadline for when features for 8.7 should be in by, and that the deadline probably ought to be 1 October, 2022. (Arbitrary, but soon. A month earlier was suggested, but was thought to be a bit too soon due to various holidays.) That would likely result in a release of both 8.7 and 9.0 this year, though 9.0 might only be a beta.

We noted that we're fairly sure that Tcl and Tk are building and testing correctly on major platforms; the only thing that might be a blocker is anything that is accepted as a contrib package. I believe we can just take the latest working versions of those when a release is made, and do another release if a later working version is available.

Strategic concerns:

• Single file distributions, especially as shared libraries. Currently there's a complicated mess when you try to mix a zip for Tcl, a zip for Tk, and a zip for the application. That should be resolved.
• UDP support is becoming more necessary.

We need to identify which TIPs should get effort to get in. Justification for that is where they offer a major new capability or where they fix something that will otherwise be awful to mend later.

arjen - 2022-08-10 06:50:19

After the meetup I realised that the single-file distribution would solve a nagging issue for using Tcl as an embedded library in, say, a Fortran program. I did some experiments with one of the available builds and got a very nice result. Not everything I wanted succeeded yet and there are a few steps to take, but it is a start and it was an evening well-spent, I think :). More to come - for instance: the steps I mentioned.