[Pkg-crosswire-devel] ICU and stability issues

[Jonathan Marsden]

Matthew Talbert wrote:

> I have asked for those saying GnomeSword will not search correctly
> without ICU to submit just such a test case, but have not seen any.
> 
> There is a thread here,
> http://www.crosswire.org/pipermail/sword-devel/2009-January/030641.html,
> that while not an official bug report, does indicate the problems, and
> upstream's action of immediately disabling many of the filters
> constitutes to me an admission that they do cause problems.

Hmmm.  Nothing very solid to go on, unfortunately.

In the absence of a repeatable bug test case, my instinct would be to do 
what the upstream developers recommend as a sane default, which is (per 
the contents of usrinst.sh in the sword-1.5.11 tarball) to use --with-icu .

Otherwise, as I see it, we're choosing to remove functionality that 
upstream has apparently previously QAed and released as enabled by 
default (and therefore as being tested and working!) in 1.5.11, their 
latest stable release.  And we're doing so purely on the basis of a 
vague bug report that no-one can reproduce!  That doesn't feel right.

Especially since --with-icu is what is already in our git repo :)  If at 
some later date we get a clear reproducible bug report of instability 
resulting from this, either from upstream or something reported to LP or 
Debian BTS against our packages, then we'd have to deal with it at that 
point.

If the upstream developers can agree on which subset of the ICU 
transliteration filters they recommend we omit, then that would make 
good sense to me as a "half-way" measure, since there is probably some 
sort of issue lurking somewhere around this stuff, but it would (I 
think!) at least leave the packaged libraries in a state where UTF-8 
collation order is somewhat correct :)

Jonathan