Tcl/Tk 8.6b1 Release Announcement
December 23, 2008

The Tcl Core Team is pleased to announce the 8.6b1 releases of the Tcl
dynamic language and the Tk toolkit. This is the first beta release
of Tcl/Tk 8.6. More details can be found below. We would like to
express our gratitude to all those who submit bug reports and patches.
This information is invaluable in enabling us to identify and eliminate
problems in the core.

Where to get the new releases:
------------------------------

Tcl/Tk 8.6b1 sources are freely available as open source from the
Tcl Developer Xchange web site at:

http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.6.html

This web page also contains additional information about the releases,
including new features and notes about installing and compiling the
releases. Sources are always available from the Tcl SourceForge
project's file distribution area:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10894

Binaries for most major platforms are available from:

http://www.activestate.com/Tcl

For additional information:
---------------------------

Please visit the Tcl Developer Xchange web site:

http://www.tcl.tk/

This site contains a variety of information about Tcl/Tk in general, the
core Tcl and Tk distributions, Tcl development tools, and much more.

Summary of Changes since Tcl/Tk 8.6a3:
--------------------------------------

The following were the main changes in Tcl/Tk 8.6b1. A complete list
can be found in the changes file at the root of the source tree. The
more complete ChangeLog is also included with each source release.

This is a beta release of 8.6. The beta designation means that the
feature set for 8.6 is believed to be complete, and the focus is now
on testing and bug fixing moving quickly toward an 8.6.0 release.
All relevant bug fixes (and some more) up to and including 8.5.6 changes
are included in 8.6b1. This release is a development release, and should
only be considered for deployment use after considerable testing.

* [TIP 329] New commands: [try], [throw]

* [TIP 234] New command: [zlib]

* [TIP 343] Enhanced commands: [format], [scan] add %b specifier.

* [TIP 332] Enhanced command: [close $chan read|write].

* New widget: [ttk::spinbox].

* [TIP 210] New subcommand: [file tempfile].

* [TIP 321] New subcommand: [tk busy].

* [TIP 324] New subcommand (dialog box): [tk fontchooser].

* [TIP 97] New subcommands: [$canvas imove], [$canvas rchars].

* [TIP 341] Enhanced subcommand: [dict filter] takes multiple patterns.

* [TIP 119] New canvas option: -angle for text items.

* [TIP 197] New text option: -insertunfocussed.

* New ttk theme: vista -- uses new "hover" state.

* [TIP 308] New package: tdbc 1.0b1 .

* [TIP 322] New routines: Tcl_NR*(): non-recursive eval for extensions.

* [TIP 336] New routines: Tcl_*ErrorLine().
*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY in interp->errorline access ***
*** Define USE_INTERP_ERRORLINE for legacy code support ***

* [TIP 307] New routine: Tcl_TransferResult().

* [TIP 335] New routine: Tcl_InterpActive().

* [TIP 337] New routine: Tcl_BackgroundException().

* [TIP 338] New routines: Tcl_*StartupScript()
*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY for callers of Tcl*Startup*() ***

* New feature: build script support for bundled packages.

* System encoding during initialization now iso8859-1, not identity.
*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

* [oo::define] revised context for name resolution, includes caller.
*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY with earlier TclOO ***

* [event generate] support for  events.

* Fixed broken [for $start $end $incr continue].

* New demos: ctext.tcl, fontchoose.tcl .

--
Tcl Core Team and Maintainers
Don Porter, Tcl Core Release Manager


-- 
| Don Porter Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division |
| donald.porter@ni... Information Technology Laboratory |
| http://math.nist.gov/~DPorter/ NIST |
|______________________________________________________________________|