It was a busy day for me, but I wanted to address the open qs here:
From: martin@v.loewis.de Mihai Ibanescu
writes: Anyway, UCS4 is something I don't think we can change now - and after reading Martin's post, it makes me feel it's the correct way to go. How can we fix the tcl/python interaction? If you have suggestions, please let me know (off-list would be fine too).
For Python perhaps, if there exist extensions which require it, but I still didn't see any convincing argument to build Tcl UCS-4. Since Martin has corrected things to work with UCS-4 Python against UCS-2 Tcl, that seems like a more sane way to go. I want to get a chance to examine what connectivity issues he found, and look into the Tk UCS-4 issues. We know a lot more about UCS-2 Tcl (the standard). It also makes it compatible with RH8 Tcl and all the extensions that people have already built. That means extension rpms made on RH8 will work on RH9 (that is not currently the case). I am interested in updating the build system to have a UCS-4 enabling build switch, but the key thing that I am worried about is the very notable excess memory usage by Tk when built with UCS-4 (just Tcl seems to be fine). Since there appears to be no imperative reason to have a UCS-4 Tcl build (thanks to Martin's shimmy magic), it would seem best not to have the default Tk bloating, along with the other issues.
P.S. What is IMO more urgently missing is "proper" support for that feature in Tcl, if it is meant to be a feature, in terms of documentation, configuration options, etc. Or, if Tcl maintainers decide this is *not* a desirable feature, it would help if they say so (but I think Jeff's comments indicate that this is unlikely).
Right, I'm aware of it, and will make it so for 8.4.4 and 8.5. It won't get back into 8.3 (which we consider end-of-devel life). Which brings up another point ... since Martin, et al, also did a great job correcting Tkinter support for 8.4, why not move up to that as the base version (it is already the base version in SuSE and Debian-testing)? It is 100% upwards compatible from 8.3 and provides numerous enhancements for Tk users (like compound buttons, new core widgets, enhanced performance, etc). Jeff Hobbs The Tcl Guy Senior Developer http://www.ActiveState.com/