[TCLCORE] The Long and Winding Road.. to 8.6.0

[Donal K. F. <don...@ma...>]

Hi everyone

I think I speak for just about everyone here when I say that I'd like to
see Tcl 8.6.0. After all, it will have many interesting features and
there's plenty of evidence that it is able to support intensive use
(e.g., the Wiki runs on 8.6). But we seem to be stuck at 8.6b1.1!

What needs to change?

Well, someone (several of us someones in fact) needs to pull their
finger out and get on with it! It's about as simple as that.

More specifically, we need to stop waiting on features before doing
another beta. The features that I see people being interested in are:

   TIPs:
     #348 on better information about errors
     #357 on better ways to handle libraries
     #362 on a fix for the [registry] command
   Non-TIPs (included for "strategic" reasons which we can discuss):
     Add basic IPv6 support (no official API changes)
     Add the Thread package to tcl/pkgs/
     Make the Unix [tk_getOpenFile] more powerful
   (Plus the usual bugfixes, of course.)

What's involved in making a release if we ignore these things? Well, the
HEAD is (usually) buildable from checkout and mostly passes its test
suite so we're not actually that far. Given how much has changed since
8.6b1, I'd actually argue that the best thing we can do now is to make
another beta. Now.

Or at least a release candidate for a beta so that we can check to see
if we build in at least the critical configurations on key platforms.
I'd argue that none of the features above are likely to be worth waiting
a beta on, and the benefit for getting out of our current stasis far
exceeds the cost of not having all the above. (Only build bugs should be
fixed in the period from b2RC1 to b2, so I'd hope that we can make that
very short.)

Once 8.6b2 is out, we can sort the above features out (or explicitly
decide to postpone them) and refocus on getting to the finishing line.
The main point is that we've got to stop messing about. The community
deserves better from us.

Donal.