TIP 467: Move TIP Collection to Fossil

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Author:         Mark Janssen <[email protected]>
State:          Final
Type:           Process
Vote:           Done
Created:        14-Mar-2017
Post-History:   
Keywords:       migration

Abstract

The Tcl TIP collection shall be moved to Fossil and the process of managing TIPs shall use Fossil as much as possible. The TIP format will be changed from a TIP-specific form to Markdown.

Rationale

Triggered by some people having issues with changing content on current TIP website and discussion on the #tcl chat, I have experimented with fossil as a medium to host the Tcl TIP collection.

The current TIP storage and handling requires a lot of scripts that need to be maintained by the TCT and it is less open than it could be. There are also advantages to switching to Fossil in place of CVS.

Besides Fossil supporting Markdown out of the box, markdown is also better option for the future than the current format. The value of making up your own plain text format in this age is debatable (especially for the TIP requirements). Markdown has widely available options to convert to other formats without any need for the community to maintain the converters, and supports key extra features such as embedded images (which are important for some Tk TIPs, and never worked particularly well with the old TIP format).

Specification

Proposed URL for the new repository will be https://core.tcl-lang.org/tips

Backwards compatibility

Option 2. doesn't help much as the mails are still online in the raw markdown files. Option 1. loses information. Suggested is to leave the addresses untouched.

Process

TBD

TIP Format

The Markdown tip format has one extension to standard Markdown:

Any TIP.md file will have a mandatory preamble starting with the title (for fossil rendering) and ending with a `------` on a single line. Between these parts there is tab indented meta information about the tip. (Tab indented so it renders nicer in fossil, 4 spaces would also work)

Example from [0]:

# TIP 0: Tcl Core Team Basic Rules
    State:          Final
    Type:           Process
    Vote:           Done
    Post-History:
------

Implementation

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.