[Pkg-crosswire-devel] ICU and stability issues

[Jonathan Marsden]

DM Smith wrote, in dialogue with Matthew Talbert:

>>> I found that diatheke uses ICU extensively.
>>>
>>> Maybe I don't understand SWORD well enough, but I can't see where 
>>> including ICU and not using transliterators causes a problem.
>>>
>>> I'd suggest, that sword-tools are compiled with ICU and, perhaps, that
>>> libsword7 is not.

>> I think this is a good idea. However, wouldn't this require that the
>> tools be statically linked? Or do they not depend on libsword at all?

> They could be statically linked. That's what I do. But I always compile 
> them for my own use.

Fine for personal use, but for packaging... yuck!  Then we would need to 
do some debian/rules packaging magic to run ./configure twice during the 
package build process, once with --with-icu and once without, and once 
for static binaries and once not... and then diatheke is useless as a 
test tool for your installed libraries, because it isn't using them, it 
is using its own differently-configured internal static copy... overall, 
I don't like this, from a packaging POV.

If we can keep the sword package debian/rules file nice and simple, and 
readable by mere mortals, then there is a much greater chance these 
packages will *stay* maintained, because even relatively novice 
packagers can understand them and update them.

> Otherwise, I'd like to see proof that ICU is actually unstable.

Me too, as already stated :)

Jonathan