To all users of ICU, and particularly to maintainers of packages that depend upon ICU, I have uploaded a new ICU to experimental. This is a "draft" release, as they call it, of ICU 3.8. There are some new interfaces and support for several new features as well as a number of bug fixes. Starting with 3.8, I have removed the soname from the -dev package name. Starting with the 3.8 upload, the -dev package will be called simply libicu-dev. The ICU people have been historically careful about source compatibility, and besides, after a few years of maintaining several library packages plus the release team's ability to trigger automatic binary NMUs, I have come to believe that it's better to omit the soname from the -dev package unless there is an explicit desire to be able to support multiple versions simultaneously. Once ICU 3.8 hits unstable (which I will coordinate with the release team since will cause a small library transition), maintainers of packages that use ICU should replace their build depends on libicu34-dev or libicu36-dev to libicu-dev. Hopefully for future ICU releases, a binary NMU will be sufficient. The new libicu-dev packages will not "provide" libicu34-dev or libicu36-dev because I have not rigorously verified that they can and wish to encourage this transition to be made once and for all. I have done some informal testing of the new packages and haven't found any problems, but I certainly encourage people with a vested interest to give these a spin especially with upstream primed to include fixes before the 3.8 release in September. -- Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>
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