[6982] in SIPB bug reports
Re: wish, exmh, etc.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Salvatore Valente)
Wed Aug 26 04:40:44 1998
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 04:40:35 -0400 (EDT)
To: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[6981] in SIPB bug reports"
From: Salvatore Valente <svalente@MIT.EDU>
As the Czar of the sipb locker, I'll throw in my two cents:
wish should remain in the tcl locker and exmh should remain in the
sipb locker.
All this silliness started when jhawk wrote:
It's a bug for anything in the sipb locker to depend on the
tcl locker, which is unmaintained (!) and unreplicated.
And Jacob replied:
I am willing to install tcl/tk in the sipb locker, if quota space
can be found.
I can't think of any good reason for tcl to be installed in the Sipb
locker. Certainly, it's a great idea for some Sipb member(s) to offer
at least the same level of support for tcl as is offered for software
in the sipb locker. However, putting tcl in a separate locker makes
life a little easier for both the people who maintain tcl (should such
people exist) and the people who maintain other software in the sipb
locker. And it may make life a little easier for the people who want
to use tcl on Athena. (If you didn't know where to find tcl on
Athena, would you be more likely to look for it in the "sipb" locker
or the "tcl" locker?)
As for the idea that it's a bug for exmh to be in the sipb locker
while there's no maintained version of tcl on Athena: No, that's not a
bug. A bug is something that keeps you from fully using the software.
("exmh doesn't work in the following way...") Granted, I don't think
any new tcl software should be installed in the sipb locker while the
tcl locker is unmaintained, but a lot of people depend on exmh to be
there, and Jacob is doing a fine job of keeping it working, so I don't
see any cause for alarm right now.
In other news, a couple of people mentioned the possibility of moving
exmh to the tcl locker and putting a symlink in the sipb locker.
However, nobody has offered even a weak argument why this would be
a good idea. It sure sounds like a waste of time to me.
In still other news, Chad mentioned:
At the time, the idea was to keep the stable tcl in sipb and the
latest in tcl...
As a generic Athena user, I'd expect to find a stable tcl installation
in a locker called "tcl", and a bleeding edge version (if one exists)
in a locker called something like "tcldev". That seems to be
more-or-less the precedent with other large systems on Athena.
Have a nice day,
Sal.
