Re: Administrativia

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, Peter Nugent wrote:

> Hi Behdad
> pls see my replies below

Thanks Peter,

> yes I think this is a realistic estimate. All the more reason to make
> sure that app owners have bought into this new library before spending a
> lot of time on it.
> so how many developers are signed up to contribute right now ?

I'm going to get involved seriously around November as I said
before.

> hmm, not sure I agree with this. Solaris has been shipping with ICU for
> a long time, OpenOffice uses it as do Apple and lots of other people so
> it can't be that bad ! If you mean no one in GNOME uses it then sure I
> agree.

Sorry, I didn't *quite* mean that.  The problem with ICU is that
it almost always is bigger than the project that needs locale
support, so, unless you are developing one of the few huge
projects, using ICU is not feasible.   If it was the case that
ICU was being shipped with all Linux distributions, it had a bit
more chance, but because of C++ ABI instabilities, that has not
happened either.

I still have not looked at ICU (would do soon), but I strongly
believe that we can borrow a lot of code from it.  Or are you
still suggesting we do not start this project and use ICU
directly?  Can you persuade Bruno, for example, to depend on ICU
in gettext?

Let me make it clear, I personally love to have all kinds of
Unicode features that ICU exports in my application development
stack, but it's really not /my/ choice.  If I use ICU in my
little tiny application, by all means, I've reduced its
portability considerably.


--behdad