Re: [xml] Adding a build/configure *option* to use ICU converters

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 04:48:03PM -0700, Jungshik Shin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Some non-Gnome projects on non-Linux platforms use libxml2, but they
> also relyon ICU for character encoding conversion in the rest of the
> project. They end
> up having two sets of character encoding converters,  iconv and ICU
> converters, which can increase the download size significantly.
>
> For those projects, it'd be very nice to have a configuration option
> in libxml2 that allow them
> to use ICU converters rather than libiconv.
>
> I made a preliminary patch and uploaded it to bugzilla (
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480323 ).
> It works well on Windows, but I haven't yet managed to change
> configure.in so that it has an 'with-icu' option.
>
> I wonder what others think about this.  It'd be also nice if somebody
> could help me with patching configure.in and related files to add
> '-with-icu' option.

  In a nutshell here is my position:
    - ICU size is like 5 times libxml2 size, we can't depend on it
    - Adding ICU support when the users need it is okay
    - This should be disabled by default, it's really a custom option
    - your patch looks nicely done

I don't see why your patch shouldn't be applied and yes adding the option
on configure would be sensible (as long as it's off by default). Also I would
really prefer if Unixes didn't switched it on when distributed as part of
the OS to maintain a predictable behaviour on all similar platforms.

Daniel

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