Tcl/Tk 8.5b1 Release Announcement
September 26, 2007

The Tcl Core Team is pleased to announce the 8.5b1 releases of the Tcl
dynamic language and the Tk toolkit.  This is the first beta release of
Tcl/Tk 8.5.  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 8.5b1 sources are freely available as open source from the Tcl
Developer Xchange web site at:

        http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.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

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.

Thank you for your contributions:
---------------------------------

As usual, this release includes contributions from the Tcl community.
We have a page honoring these contributors at:

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

Summary of Changes since Tcl/Tk 8.5a6:
--------------------------------------

The following were the main changes in Tcl/Tk 8.5b1.  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 8.5.  The beta designation means that the
feature set for 8.5 is believed to be complete, and the focus is now
on testing and bug fixing moving quickly toward an 8.5.0 release.
All relevant bug fixes (and some more) up to and including 8.4.16 changes
are included in 8.5b1.  The following list focuses on new features added
so far in 8.5.  This release is a development release, and should only be
considered for deployment use after considerable testing.

  * Removed support for {expand} syntax
    *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY with 8.5 alphas only ***

  * [TIP 145] Enhanced font handling.

  * Tcl variable memory efficiency improved.
    *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY for users of internal structs ***

  * Leave traces created during traced command execution do not fire.
    *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  * Restored 8.4 compatibility of [package require -exact]
    *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY with 8.5 alphas only ***

  * Revised parser expands {*} literals instead of returning a
    TCL_TOKEN_EXPAND_WORD token
    *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY with 8.5 alphas only ***

  * Tcl_GetObjType("nsName") no longer supported.
    *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  * Fixed crash in nested [dict update].
    *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY with bytecode from 8.5 alphas ***

  * Fixed panic in [text] DLine layout.

  * Fixed crash in ::errorInfo traces.

  * Fixed crash in [grid *configure].

  * Improved Aqua ttk::combobox appearance.

  * Fixed interactive tclsh failure to prompt for continuation line when
    entered line ends with backslash-newline.

  * Make [interp limit -command] able to stop [while 1 {}].

  * Fixed open mode "a+".

  * [info] is a [namespace ensemble].

  * Set tcl_platform(user) from system, not environment.

  * [clock] tzdata updated to Olson's tzdata2007g.

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