taking over ICU, library/C++ transition issues

[Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>]

After a private discussion with Ivo, we decided that I will take over
maintenance of the icu packages.  The only reverse dependencies that
are part of the archive are xerces packages which I also maintain.
The version of ICU in debian is version 2.1.  The current version is
3.2.  Debian also includes version 2.8 as the icu28 package, but this
package will probably be removed after 3.2 is uploaded and reverse
dependencies of icu28 are moved back to the ICU package.  (Its only
non-trivial reverse dependency is the "mail-notification" package.)

There are API and ABI changes between 2.1 and 3.2 (not surprisingly)
and also between 2.8 and 3.2.  There is also a C++ library here.

Given that nothing urgently needs version 3.2, would it be better to
wait to do the ICU library transition until after the C++ transition
is done?  Do we have a time frame on that yet?

There is also the issue of the icu-doc package which is now owned by
icu28 instead of icu.  I'll see if we can come up with a better
solution before I upload 3.2.  I think there should be only one icu
package whose source package is "icu" and it should create the binary
package called icu-doc.

Please let me know if I should have posted this to debian-devel.  I
posted it here because it pertains to a library transition and a C++
transition.

-- 
Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>