Re: New external dependecy request (ICU)

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh gnu org>]

On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 02:14, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> I want to add a new GNOME dependency on icu (
> http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/).

I am against this, although I've been a contributor to ICU. The main
reason, is the non-open process in ICU, as IBM controls it heavily. Even
the bug report process is not open, that is while you can see bug
reports of the other people, you can't see the developers' comments on
them!

This means that it's not developed in the bazaar model, while it can be
called Open Source or free software based on the license.

> As GNOME translators know, we have lots of modules translating the same
> strings (language names, country names, timezone names, date/time
> formats, etc...).

That is interesting. Actually, for some of the ICU locales, the ICU team
doesn't want the list of country names included, and says it consumes
space unnecessarily.

> What will we won with ICU?
> 
> Just look at: http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/lx/en/?_=es_ES and
> you will see all the information we can get without the need of a
> translator to give us that information.

glibc also has some of those information, and a few other things ICU
doesn't have. We need to extend the locale format somehow, maybe.

> Of course, I'm not talking about use all icu functionality because it
> has some functionality already available with libc but the translations
> database is the best thing we can get, also, it's used by other projects
> so there are more people maintaining it.

The translation database is exactly the place they don't want to expend
much on.

roozbeh