[issue11071] What's New review comments

[Ned Deily]

Ned Deily <nad at acm.org> added the comment:

I understand your point and it is not a huge issue but let me make an attempt to expand on the rationale.

> * for right now, it is needed to get tkinter to work and if we're too indirect about the fix, no one will find it and their install won't work.

It may be indirect but the situation is complicated and dynamic.  There are references to the canonical webpage in the Installer welcome message (in bold), the Installer ReadMe, and in IDLE if the known-to-be-problematic Apple version is being used.  As it stands, the What's New document is the only place that doesn't refer to the webpage.

> * if other options become available in the future or it stops being needed, I will update the whatsnew recommendation in a point release.

That's fine but it doesn't necessarily help the users who will not be installing cutting edge versions of Python 3.2.x maintenance releases.

> * the recommendation won't stop being correct.  it may become unnecessary, but it will still work.

That's not necessarily true.  We have no control over what ActiveState does.  From their website:

>Looking for access to older versions of ActiveTcl?
>  Community Edition offers access to the newest versions of ActiveTcl.
>  Access to older versions is available only in Business Edition.

We could find that the current working version has been replaced by one that doesn't work.  Between the ActiveState 8.5.8.2 (released earlier in 2010) and 8.5.9, there was a huge change, going from supplying the Carbon-based Tk version (which was supported on Mac OS 10.4+ and on PPC and Intel 32-bit-only archs) to the Cocoa-based one (10.5+ and Intel-only and 32-/64-bit).  The Carbon one is no longer available to the community.  If you were using Tk 8.5 on a PPC machine or on 10.4, my understanding it that you are now out of luck unless you make arrangements with ActiveState to be covered under presumably a non-zero-cost license.  Something like that could happen again.

There is also the issue of the ActiveState community license; some users of the python.org distribution may not be able to use the ActiveState version because of its terms.  There are more details that need to be filled in on the download page prior to release to expand on that.

The whole point of creating the canonical webpage is to have one place to go for the current information in an inherently dynamic environment.  I think there is a strong case to change the wording in the What's New as suggested but, if you think it better to not do so, I will be OK with your decision.

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