All:
The ICU that is bundled with Parrot is old. Normally
that wouldn't be a problem if you didn't require all
the features and bug fixes with a newer version, but
we are still having problems with ICU and are even
supplying patches for it.
I went through a personal nightmare of getting it to
work on Cygwin and others went through their own
trials and tribulations to get it to work for them.
Options were added to allow linking against a system
ICU, but is this the sore thumb we really want to have
people giving Parrot a first look to encounter?
George Rhoten, an ICU developer, has suggested we
start shipping version 3.0 because:
"It contains a lot of fixes and additional features to
improve such things as building on Cygwin, building
with the Intel compiler, quicker building of the data
library, additional platforms for building ICU and a
lot of other helpful fixes."
The trouble is someone has to volunteer to make it
work. If we are going to go through that trouble,
maybe we should consider other alternatives:
A. Bundling the whole thing instead of just the
pieces Parrot is going to use. This, in theory,
should make upgrading ICU easier in the future.
B. Make ICU optional. I know this has been discussed
at it takes work. If people don't want Unicode
support it shouldn't be forced on them, but if they do
want it should they be forced to download an external
library or should we provide it. I think since we
already support linking to a system ICU we do that.
C. Have someone volunteer to strip stuff out of the
3.0 version and start bundling that.
There are likely other options but as George pointed
out - we appear to be spending an awful lot of effort
making the old ICU work when upgrading would solve all
our problems (my words not his).
Cheers
Joshua Gatcomb
a.k.a. Limbic~Region
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