On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:33 AM, Reinier Lamers <[email protected]>wrote:
> 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. > Is there any reason why the ICU related packages on Hackage cannot bundle a copy for windows? I'm assuming they should probably bundle the windows binaries. The only reasons that come to mind for me: a) The binaries might be depressingly large, and anyone getting the package would have to download them (unless we do some clever tricks in the package deps). b) Someone has to keep the hackage package updated as new releases happen. c) Potential licensing issues (I only suggest this because I didn't explicitly check that it's not a problem). I realize it's easy to say, "It's not our responsibility to package/distribute lib icu", but I think that's a potentially slippery slope. I also think that as soon as we made lib icu *required* we made a commitment to make sure people can get libicu at least as easily as darcs itself. Could we have an option to install darcs without libicu? Since we're only using it for normalization it seems like some people might want to just forgo the normalization step and have a darcs without it. > > 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. > I agree that we should have a windows installer and I think we should have it regardless of lib icu. So what are we requiring of people who do want to build darcs on windows? What level of headache are we talking about? It would be nice to hear from someone who has gone through the motions. Jason
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