[TCLCORE] Report of Biweekly telco on 11th of August at 12:00 UTC

[Harald O. <har...@el...>]

Dear Tcl/Tk team,

Schelte notified me, that I use the word "eventually" in the German 
sense, which is "possibly". Sorry for that.

Top 1) Celebrate Tcl/Tk 9.1a0 release
What is next?
- TIP 713 revision of the next steps proposed
Jul 25    9.1a0
Nov 25    9.1a1
Feb 26    9.1a2
May 26    9.1b0
Jul 26    9.1b1
Aug 26    9.1b2
Sep 26    9.1.0

Thoughts:
- New timeline approved.
- Minor features should not wait for 2 years.
   Major things, like the Accessability may go to 9.2.
- We were occupied by 9.0 implementation for 1 year. Now, we have more 
time for new features, so 9.2 may come one year after 9.1.
- we can not make happy anybody. No resources for fast track projects.

- Question by Kevin Waltzer on Tk accessibility support TIP
May 2026 is the deadline.

- Sarcastic E-Mail by Christian Werner on the release

Top 2) Tcl 8.6.17

New SQLite may be included in rc1.

This is the fore-last release of 8.6.
Then it is end of life.
Messaging about the last release should be careful.
2038 is the physical limit.

Top 3) TIP 726: Commands for Unicode normalization

Jan will have a look on it.
ICU would be better, but does not exist on Mac.
So, this solution is seen as better.
Something basic in the core is great.
An extension would be harder.

Top 4) TIP 722: Return loaded packages by "package present"

Packaging system is fragile. Any modification is critical.
No objection, but is there a use-case?
The TIP returns the package names. Than, the package command may be used.
If this exists at C level, it may be exposed.

Currently, "package names" and "package present" may be used to find all 
loaded packages.
But this tool is quicker in time.
It has no practical advantage.

Top 5) TIP 689: Namespace unknown resolves in caller or target?

Ashoks proposal is to have 2 commands.
The use case "caller namespace" is not seen as having a use-case.
The case "called namespace" has the late loading use-case.

A work-around is to use full qualified path.

Ask Donal Fellows...

Top 6) TCLCompile for 9.0/9.1
Miguel Bañón is active
To orphaned packages?

Top 7) Tk dialogs on small screens:
https://core.tcl-lang.org/tk/info/e19f1d8914442195
https://core.tcl-lang.org/tk/info/7c28f8351e3cebeb

Ok to put SDL specific code to Tk.

Top 8) TkTable
Fix by Christian.
Orphaned packages?



Top 9) FreeBSD
Pietro Cerutti's E-Mail.
- TIP 439

There were so many issues and discussion.
Other projects (Java) use semantic versioning, but publish a major each 
year to get rid of the restrictions.

Tcl package system can support different versions, for different 
versions of Tcl. This interfears with the packagers view.

Thread package was cleaned up with 3.0. This is seen as an improvement.
Sorry, that it does not work with older versions.
Tk is the same...

- TIP 486
Not discussed.

Pietro accepted to be in the meeting in two weeks.
Perhaps, Reinhard may also participate.

Top 10) Remove virtual screen support in Tk?


Top 11) Each interpreter looks for TCL library

In TCL 9 , interpeter creation time is much higher.
But why does each interpreter looks for a tcl library on his own?

In TCL 8.6, the main point was the encoding, as the source command 
needed it.

In 9.0, we always use utf-8, so this problem does not exist any more.

New interpreter needs 2ms. TclOO loading needs 1.4ms. Is lazy loading of 
TclOO a good idea?

The main point is the Tcl_Init environment variable with the path to 
Tcl_Init.
An interpreter may change this for its slave interpreters, which may use 
a different Tcl_Init file.

---

Next meeting:
12th of August 18:00 UTC: TCL Meetup (I am not available)
25th of August 12:00: Bi-weekly Telco (I am available)

Note: in September and October, I will not be able to attend the meetings.

Thank you for all,
Harald