Tcl 8.5 To-do List

George Peter Staplin 08.02.2006 - The goal of this page is to help the Tcl community contribute to the Tcl 8.5 release. A number of issues should be resolved before the release.

Tcl is a community project and we own it.

You could say that Tcl is The Community Language. :)

1. Update the Tcl tutorial with the latest 8.5 features.
2. Eliminate the unbraced exprs in the tutorial. done
3. Reduce the number of priority 9 bugs. Any contributions to get closer to this is helpful.
4. Reduce the overall number of bugs. Any bug is worth fixing.
5. Follow up on unclosed yet, apparent fixed bugs. Make sure we can move forward.
6. Remove CONST from Tk's C API documentation. (Tcl is already done).
7. void * is now accepted in Tcl, but a lot of the code uses the VOID macro that replaces VOID for ANSI-C with "void *"
8. Remove some unnecessary casts now that we have void *.

The bug trackers for Tcl and Tk are linked to from here: http://tcl.sf.net

Add your name to this page with a list of 1 or more things you're doing, so that we don't get duplicate effort.

If you deem the fix useful then please thank that person. Often times open source work is a thankless job, but it doesn't have to be :)

• RLH I will do #2: Update - This was already done by NEM
• George Peter Staplin I'm working on Tcl bug 1028264

See also: I want to be a Tcl developer

NEM Regarding item 1 - updating the tutorial - my understanding (as a maintainer for the tutorial) was that the tutorial is supposed to be a brief introduction rather than a comprehensive coverage of all features. While I agree that some usage in the tutorial could be updated to show best-practice in 8.5, I'm not sure that we need to cover every new command. Item 2 has already been commited by me, see [L1 ].

RLH How about we take a page from the Perl playbook. When I look at their documentation I see short "essays" on different subjects like "perlstyle", "perltrap", "perlcheat", "perlintro" etc. These are short example ridden forays into various areas of Perl. It would not be too hard to look at some of that and make it Tcl specific. It could be in a format easily converted to others or just done in HTML.

Sarnold Do you really think it could be *just done in HTML* ? That would be the dirty way if ever - to achieve this goal. I have translated quite all the Tutorial in French with a markup language built with tcllib (via textutil::expander) and just 3 scripts can handle all the content. It is far cleaner to write it this way, the result is even XHTML-1.0 compliant. More than it, it is maintainable... believe me. RLH Sure it *could* be but that is just a tag on the sentence and wouldn't be my *preferred* way. : )