On Tuesday, December 2, 2025 3:02:45 PM Mountain Standard Time Soren Stoutner
wrote:
On Tuesday, December 2, 2025 1:27:02 AM Mountain Standard Time Alastair
McKinstry wrote:
Hi
I would like to plan a transition for unicode-data 16.0.0 -> 17.0.0
I am the maintainer of courier-unicode. I asked upstream if he anticipated
that building against 17.0.0 would cause any problems.
https://github.com/svarshavchik/courier-libs/issues/52
Upstream responded (in part):
"More subtle differences are also possible. The code might still compile but
be non-compliant with the standard. Let's say that Unicode 17 includes changes
to the line-breaking or the bi-directional algorithm (the logic that uses
LineBreak.txt and various Bidi txt files). I don't know if it does or not, I
haven't looked yet. They don't change in every release but they do change,
from time to time. If so, this will require a code change. The algorithm
change might also involve a related change to the data files, which might not
be severe enough to result in a compilation failure. Everything will continue
to compile but without the corresponding logic changes the end result will not
comply with the standard. Making things even more interesting is that
LineBreak and Bidi might remain unchanged, from standard to standard, but
there's a new revision of the corresponding algorithms, so you can't always
tell just by comparing the files.”
Looking over the list of affected packages, I suspect that not all of them
will have upstream support for unicode-data 17.0.0 at the same time. My
recommendation is that, during transitions, we maintain two version of
unicode-data in Debian, one for the old version and one for the new version.