Hi all, I'd like to come back to the ICU dependency introduced by the UTF-8 patches, to settle this well in time for darcs 2.5.
To summarize the problem for those that don't remember immediately:
The UTF-8-enabled darcs applies Unicode normalization to the metadata strings
before storing them, so that equivalent characters are always encoded in the
same way. To do this, it uses the ICU library. This ICU library is not on
hackage. This causes problems especially for Windows people, because they
can't just get an ICU from their package manager.
My proposed solution is to accept that "cabal install darcs" is going to be
hard on Windows, and supply a Windows Installer package for Windows users.
The reasons are the following:
* Windows Installer is even easier than "cabal install", especially to
non-Haskellers.
* Darcs is a version control system, not a Haskell toy. Being reliable and
bug-free is more important than being cabal-installable.
This, of course, assumes that we have the knowledge and manpower to make
Windows Installers. I have some experience making installar packages with WiX
(http://wix.sourceforge.net/). Is anyone else able to help out with this?
It also assumes that ICU can be used from Haskell at all using Windows. A
quick Google search turns up that it can be built using MSVC or Cygwin, but
MinGW appears to be unsupported. So it should be possible to link with MSVC-
compiled code from GHC. http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell-
[email protected]/msg59508.html about building text-icu on Windows suggests
that it's possible. Can some Windows Haskeller confirm that?
Reinier
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