Re: Is ActiveTcl 8.5 release to be used as it is?

Alexandre Ferrieux wrote:
Jeff Hobbs wrote:
Alexandre Ferrieux wrote:
It would have been *very* cool to announce this beforehand (or even
better, name the package "incremental" or "upgrade")...
This isn't the first release of AT 8.5, and it hasn't changed since
the betas. This shouldn't be that big a surprise, as this has been
discussed since first release of the AT 8.5 beta. The 8.5-on-top-
of-8.4 supported install was in fact a design goal for AT.

Oh -- so all users of Tcl are supposed to follow all the betas, and
discussions on c.l.t to be valid users ?

While we don't expect anyone to follow the alphas, it'd be nice if
people (especially package maintainers) did start testing things when we
start declaring betas, since that lets us get the final release right.
OTOH, experience teaches that many people don't try anything at all
until the final release; that's why patch releases are often forthcoming
after not that long after a .0 (of anything, not just Tcl/Tk). :-\

Now to answer your question, things I tend to depend on are just Snack
and Img. I realize this is due to my specific context. I'm not ready
to fight for their default inclusion. However, I'd love to see on the
AT site:

- either a "fat" (8.4-like) distrib
- or a one-line teacup invocation making the local repository
"fat".
- or an option in the installer to do the above

What about a half-fat ("semi-skimmed"? "pouring cream"?) distribution,
which includes some key packages but not others? Mind you, the idea of
having an option in the installer to pull packages from the teapot is a
nice one.

So that I can continue interacting by phone with people, telling them
only "just install AT8.5 fat" or something not much longer.

Part of that's addressable through teapot profiles, if I've grokked the
listings and help messages right. On the other hand, they're currently
harder (and slower) to use than they should be; harder because any
introspection automatically adds a lot of information about packages and
profiles I'm not interested in (wrong platform or obsolete) and slower
because for some reason there's no actual caching of metadata. The first
problem is really to do with who the intended audience of teacup is
(individual users or sysadmins) and the second problem is something I
hope will be fixed. :-)

Donal.
.

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