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Re: [TCLCORE] 8.7a1 Feature Target List

From: Donald G Porter <dona...@nist.gov>
Thu, 13 Jul 2017 15:35:39 -0400
On 07/12/2017 05:08 PM, Donal K. Fellows wrote:
> I've been thinking a bit about 8.7 schedules in the light of talking to> people at EuroTcl, and I think we ought to have a goal of getting the> first alpha out this year. (More would be OK too.) But in order to make> 8.7a1 worth releasing, we really ought to have some key features to make> it a bit awesome. So what could they possibly be?

FWIW, my plan has been to get 8.6.7 out the door first (and that's
taking far too long as I struggle to get Itcl 4.1 release-worthy).
Then I would immediately release 8.7a0 with the feature(s) it already
has -- notably the new notifier.

I generally support your call for more features, more quickly, and
I agree that the ones most likely to need some trial by fire would
be better to get in sooner.  But I don't have any intent to make
a first alpha release wait for anything.  Whatever's in the trunk
goes out when the time comes.

>    1: Minimal support for Unicode beyond the BMP.

Months ago we had TIP 389 very nearly ready.  Just a few bugs
in the handling of the Tcl_UniChar array representation needed
fixing since this becomes a variable-length instead of fixed-length
encoding in the revised scheme.  Is there any major objection to
seeing that through as the best available path here?

>    2: Zip VFS.

This is a very welcome idea.  We've taken a few stabs at it
and every time it grows out of control.  ("Oh, if you're going
to do that, then you'll need to fix TEA.... and then you should
really invent a whole new build system for starkit making... and then...").

> Big Ticket Items for Tk:> >    1: Contrib package system for Tk to follow pattern of Tcl 8.6.

I understand you seek to benefit from bundling lots of
good functionality in existing Tk extension packages, but
someone has to report the downside to this.

If we didn't bundle other packages, Tcl 8.6.7 would have been out
months ago.

Bundling is an enormous burden on release-making.  Very nearly
deal-breaking.  Juggling seven balls really is harder than two.

If every bundled package could be like sqlite3, there would be no
issue.  Vigorous owner making high quality releases on his own
calendar. Just grab and go.

Not every package is like that.  Some are unhousebroken puppies
left by the side of the road.

Proceed with caution and expect me to have extreme skepticism.

I'll also mention that my idealized vision has not been to have
Tk grow a tk/pkgs directory/.  It has been to TEA-tame Tk itself
so that it and its extensions drop into the tcl/pkgs directory.

-- 
| Don Porter            Applied and Computational Mathematics Division |
| dona...@nist.gov             Information Technology Laboratory |
| http://math.nist.gov/~DPorter/                                  NIST |
|______________________________________________________________________|

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Recent Messages in this Thread
Donal K. Fellows Jul 12, 2017 09:08 pm
Brad Lanam Jul 12, 2017 10:00 pm
Peter da Silva Jul 13, 2017 01:23 pm
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Donald G Porter Jul 13, 2017 01:38 pm
Dipl. Ing. Sergey G. Brester via Tcl-Core Jul 13, 2017 03:19 pm
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Harald Oehlmann Jul 13, 2017 08:29 pm
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Donal K. Fellows Jul 13, 2017 10:28 pm
Harald Oehlmann Jul 17, 2017 07:56 am
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