Re: Connecting those interested in getting GT.M intotheDebianrepositories
GT.M - Rock solid. Lightning fast. Secure. No compromises.
On 09/07/2010 04:18 PM, Andreas Tille wrote:
On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 09:54:48AM -0400, K.S. Bhaskar wrote:
> [KSB] Thank you, Charles. This is is a handy feature that I was not
> aware of!
Debian is cool, isn't it? ;-)
[KSB] Yes, indeed!
> The first question is: should the GT.M package require ICU (International
> Components for ICU) or should it recommend it?
We would simply trust your decision. If you consider GT.M as dependant
from libicu we use Depends. However, a Recommends is de facto quite
strong. If a user does not explicitely exclude recommends these
packages will be installed anyway. So you should probably answer the
question: Can you imagine any real application where GT.M should run
without libicu. If the answer is yes, use Recommends to give the admin
a chance to avoid libicu. For all practical cases a Recommends is
sufficient.
> The reason for recommending ICU but not requiring it: for people
> developing applications that are strictly ASCII based (all characters in
> all strings that the applications handles are single byte with the high
> order bit 0), ICU support is unnecessary overhead. For applications that
> are pure English can use pure ASCII and not care.
>
> The reason for: if ICU is not required, those developing applications
> that are not pure ASCII may be tempted to use ISO-8859 variants that have
> the high order bit set to 1 instead of using UTF-8. Given that there is
> not a single ISO-8859 variant that works for all European languages, if
> there are applications that use languages other than English, requiring
> ICU encourages those application developers to use a better character
> encoding.
[KSB] All VistA implementations in the United States are pure ASCII.
IMHO as long as you are dealing with peoples names you always have to
respect non-ASCII characters even in pure English environments.
[KSB] In the United States, it is common to pretend that there are no
non-ASCII characters in names. So, for example, umlauts are usually
dropped in favor of the letters without umlauts (I would prefer them to
insert an "e" but we don't do that - e.g., we spell the city Zurich and
not Zuerich).
But, OK, I understand - GT.M should recommend ICU, and not depend on it.
Also, most Linux systems outside the US (and maybe other English
speaking countries) will probably have ICU installed anyway.
> The second question is: for ICU support, should GT.M require or recommend
> libicu## or should it require or recommend libicu-dev?
There are only "Build-Depends" (and no Build-Recommends) - so this is
simple.
[KSB] I am a little confused as to what this means in practice. Building
GT.M will require ICU (libicu-dev), but this is so that the binaries can
use ICU if it is installed. Running GT.M does not require ICU unless an
application wants to use UTF-8.
Regards
-- Bhaskar
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