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

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

On 16/03/2010 18:36, Donal K. Fellows wrote:
> 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

For these things, it's probably better if, instead of making any
specific commitment to have them in 8.6b2 or not, we instead set a
strict timebox on how long we'll wait. Call me impatient if you want,
but the community has been waiting for b2 for 16 months now. :-)

OK, the specific discussions:

   #348 and #362 are two TIPs that I just don't have a great feel for
   one way or the other. They might well be ready right now; I'm too
   ignorant to be able to say. :-)

   #357 is very close, and I keep getting surprised that Kevin and Joe
   can't reach agreement over it. What can the rest of us do to help?

   IPv6... This is the one we have to deal with. Possibly also back-port
   to 8.5. The issue is that (if my reading of the runes is right) it
   won't be very long (year or two) before the IPv4 address space is
   exhausted in some parts of the world. Getting Tcl ready before the
   catastrophe strikes is a good thing, especially as it takes time to
   roll things out into distributions. I'd like the script-level API to
   be as non-invasive as possible too, please (but only TCP is needed
   over IPv6; other things are out of scope).

   Thread package... We've needed this for ages (along with making the
   threaded build default) so that we can take advantage of modern
   hardware, and it is a quite thoroughly tested configuration and
   package, but we keep getting stymied by Expect on Unix. Can we dare
   to move anyway? Can we tell if Expect needs problem things like
   [fork]? A lot of expect scripts don't.

   Unix [tk_getOpenFile]... Oh well, mea culpa. In my defence, it's
   actually a tricky thing to improve in the ways suggested in the
   submitted patches.

In summary, of these I'd say that two (IPv6 and Thread) are very
important due to the changing nature of the environment in which Tcl
finds itself; the driving changes are coming whether we change ourselves
or not. And #357 would be nice to have too (as it is a blocker for
including TDBC drivers with a Tcl distribution). The other three could
slip b2 without any great harm, though if they get done that's cool too.

I'm not planning to listen to anyone who suggests that we should wait
until all prio9 bugs are dealt with. Well, not unless they also work on
dealing with the remaining nasty ones... ;-)

Donal.