[sword-devel] icu-sword

[Chris Little]

> 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?

You're right. :)  This is a possibility in the future, though current
distributions don't package ICU and very few projects are using it.
Since our data is the only part that's different, we could rename our
data .so if we can find a way to specify an alternate data library to
ICU.  I don't know much about .so's in Linux, but I think the solution
in Windows would be easy--we would just leave our versions of the DLLs
in the Sword directory so it loads those instead of the system default.
There might also be ways of loading a second data library in ICU that I
haven't found.

I noticed also that ICU 2.0 is targetted for release next month, and I
know backwards compatability is one of their new focusses, so there may
be new features to allow loading different versions of data.

--Chris