Re: Administrativia

[Peter Nugent <Peter Nugent Sun COM>]

Hi Behdad
yes, I was hoping we would be using ICU directly. This is what I've 
being trying to persuade people to do.
If the issue is that ICU is too big then I know that with ICU4J it is 
posisble just to build certain modules. I would assume ICU4c is similar.

As for ICU's unstable interface, I don't see it as a big problem unless 
we are interested in methods declared as unstable. We should investigate 
and see if we need any of these or not. If we can get most of our data 
from stable APIs then I don't see a problem.
Remember in 2 years time when our new API becomes stable and usable , 
ICU will have also improved a lot.

Does anyone know why linux distros don't have ICU ?

thx
Peter


Peter Nugent,
Software Engineer,
Sun Microsystems Ireland Ltd,
Hamilton House,
East Point Business Park,
Dublin 3,
Ireland.
Tel +353.1.8199522
Email: peter nugent sun com


Behdad Esfahbod ha scritto:
> 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
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