[Tcllib-devel] Tcllib 1.21 Release To Come, And Further

[Andreas K. <and...@gm...>]

Hi all.

[[
    This is an edited copy of something I posted on the Tcler's Chat
    today. IOW some of you may have seen this already.

    Mailing it around now for wider dispersal / attention.
]]

I have opened the `tcllib-1-21-rc` branch for work on the next Tcllib release, 
1.21.
(It is about 2.5 years since 1.20 was released).

See
	https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcllib/timeline?r=tcllib-1-21-rc

for the timeline.

I am setting a deadline of Fri May 6 for the release work (see below).
The weekend of May 7/8 is when I want to finalize and publish everything.

Currently done:

  - Fixed the `sak review` helper.

  - Fixed a number of packages which were changed, yet did not have
    their version bumped.

  - Bumped the Tcllib main version.
  
  - Generated the initial release README summarizing changes since 1.20.

    See
    https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcllib/file?name=support/releases/history/README-
1.21.txt

    This will be updated as work is done in the coming 1.5 weeks.

Things to still do:

  - Looking at more tickets easy to fix.

  - @arjen - Please keep me informed wrt your progress on the figurate fixes.

  - @pooryorick - Please keep me informed wrt your progress on the mime2 work.

  - @rkeene - Please look at open PKI tickets

  - @hypnotoad - Please look at tickets for your packages (httpd, processman, 
etc. pp.)

  - All/Generally: Please bring tickets felt to be important to my attention.

    Note however: Tickets without repro code and/or patch and/or tests
    are automatically low priority to me.

And looking beyond 1.21 my plan is to have a larger cleanup, as in:

  1. Even Tcl 8.5 is end of life for oever 6 years now (8.5.19 was 2016-02-12).
     Let alone 8.4 and older.
     Some of the packages in Tcllib still declare 8.2 as min requirement/

     I want to declare everything before 8.6 as unsupported now.
     There was enough time to switch.

     That will make development much easier as there is no need to
     think about if a command, function, syntax is supported by the
     declared min-version of the package, or not. Recently seen with a
     patch using the `max` function. Does not exist in 8.4.

  2. For all the packages which come in multiple major versions (md5
     IIRC, various struct/math packages, snit, ...) drop, as in,
     remove, anything but the last version. The mime package would be
     an exception to that given that its new major version (v2) would
     have appeared only with 1.21, without a decade or more for users
     to switch.

This release should then be Tcllib 2.0.

-- 
Happy Tcling,
	Andreas Kupries <and...@gm...>
			<https://core.tcl-lang.org/akupries/>
			<https://akupries.tclers.tk/>
	Developer @	SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH
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