tcl/tk 8.6.10 subtle issues on Mac #278

After a recent "pkgin upgrade", my exmh keybindings started misbehaving a bit. In particular, the Meta-less and Meta-greater bindings stopped working in the "Escape-less" and "Escape-greater" forms. Using the Meta-Shift-comma and Meta-Shift-period forms of the keystrokes still work, but both forms are supposed to be equivalent (in exmh's Simple Editor, which is what you use to compose new messages).

This pkgsrc upgrade changed tcl and tk from version 8.6.8 to version 8.6.10. I eventually found that if I symlink out the tcl and tk items back to a backup copy of my pkgsrc tree prior to the upgrade, the exmh keybinding problem goes away. Here are the items I symlinked back to their tcl and tk 8.6.8 versions:

/opt/pkg/bin/wish
/opt/pkg/lib/tcl8.6
/opt/pkg/lib/tk8.6
/opt/pkg/lib/libtk86.1.0.dylib
/opt/pkg/lib/libtcl86.1.0.dylib

Note that all the rest of the "upgraded" pkgsrc stack remains in place, so all the X11 and other dependencies are apparently fine, as is the exmh code itself. FWIW, the problem first appeared after a pkgsrc upgrade I did in late June-2020, but remains after an upgrade done yesterday, 13-Aug-2020.

This is macOS Catalina (10.15.6), but I doubt that is relevant, since it's only the tcl/tk version change which seems to have caused the problem.

Thanks and regards,

Marion