[TCLCORE] Summary of online meet 2025-09-22

[<apn...@ya...>]

Summary of yesterday's online meeting.

 

Attendees: Reinhard, Rolf, Steve, Jan, Schelte, Don, Ashok

 

1. The first topic covered in the meeting was the creation of "official"
batteries-included binary distributions for the three major platforms. There
was general agreement from those who have used it that Paul's BAWT build
system would form a good basis for the effort. While the initial suggestion
was to use GitHub actions for the purpose, Steve suggested that having
volunteers for each platform would be an alternative given possible issues
with usage limits on GitHub actions and requirement for additional steps
such as MacOS binary signatures. The question of the packaging mechanisms
for Linux binaries was raised with suggested solutions including static
binaries, SNAP, Flatpack and Docker. The decision is best left to whoever
volunteers for the Linux platform. With regards to signing, Steve will talk
to Phil Brooks about obtaining signing certificates. Paul clarified that
BAWT cannot currently pull from source repositories but downloads release
archives. Ashok commented that the package authors have the responsibility
for creating official releases of their packages if they are to be included
in the official distribution.

 

Next steps: need volunteers for each of the platforms - Windows, Linux and
MacOS - and someone to oversee / drive the project. The build process using
BAWT as well as its internal design is very well documented, so prospective
volunteers are encouraged to try it out. Without platform volunteers, this
project will go nowhere.

 

2. The second topic of discussion was the ticket regarding implementation of
recursive mutexes already under discussion in
https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcl/info/893f8cc5db3ba8bd. Jan said he had a
working fix for Unix that he was satisfied with but the Windows equivalent
was still crashing and needed further work. [Editorial comment: as discussed
in the previous ticket link, both Sergey and Ashok are still of the opinion
that Tcl should stick to non-reentrant mutexes so the matter is not entirely
closed but for now there is a partial fix in place.]

 

3. Ashok introduced TIP 732 which seeks to formalize and streamline Tcl
interpreter creation and search for its libraries. The TIP is still work in
progress but it was the general opinion this was an area worth addressing.

 

4. Steve provided an update on the effort to move core to TCT controlled
infrastructure on linode for the reasons he cited in his earlier email to
the core mailing list. The transition is targeted for some time next month
and should hopefully be transparent to users. As part of the transition, 2FA
will be introduced and a team of maintainers will be formed.

 

5. Schelte raised the issue of core notifications being broken after the
reboot a few days ago. There was a fair amount of discussion around this but
I'm afraid I could not follow the technical details to be able to summarize
this. 

 

6. Andreas raised similar issue with the Slack bridge to the chat. It
appears Roy has now fixed this.