[sword-devel] icu-sword

[Martin Gruner]

Hey Chris,

> All libraries except for the data library are identical to the version
> of ICU from IBM.  Our data library will be different and incompatible
> with IBM's.
>
> At the moment, everything that uses ICU in Sword would work with either
> data libaray, but that will change soon as I add features that use our
> custom & updated transliterators.  I'm not sure if a missing
> transliterator would cause a crash, but it would definitely fail to work
> correctly.
>
> I suppose we could support building with the official ICU, with our
> custom ICU, or without ICU at all, if we wanted, but you would lose
> features without our version.

Thanks for the info! What concerns me is that there may be users who already 
have the official ICU installed. ICU is basically a external software that 
sword has become dependent upon. In future there might be additional 
dependencies like libxml2 or similar libraries.
So I don't know if providing "our own" version would be the best thing to do. 
If it is possible, it might be better to require users to install ICU (maybe 
included in their distro) and then provide some add-on package that extends 
ICU to care for sword in the right way.

Do you think this would be useful and possible? I see that there's a 
different situation for the windows platform, but in different environments?

Martin