ICU transition for squeeze?
In response to your request to debian-devel-announce, I'd like to ask if
it's possible to transition ICU to version 4.4 for squeeze. 4.4 is
supposed to be released this coming week, and we had several pre-release
versions in experimental. The ICU packages are set up so that binary
NMU's are usually if not always sufficient, and the ICU upstream has
what I believe to be a perfect track record when it comes it maintaining
API compatibility. The last few ICU transitions have gone through
without incident.
The most "important" package that depends on ICU is openoffice.org. My
usual policy with respect to ICU transitions is to make sure openoffice
tests with the new version and, if everything is okay, to upload and ask
the release team to schedule binary NMUs for its reverse dependencies.
A 4.4 release candidate was released last week. I haven't uploaded to
experimental yet because of a small problem with installation. There
are two possible solutions, both of which are easy, but I'm waiting for
upstream to let me know which one they prefer. The most likely
progression will be that I upload 4.4-1 to experimental for NEW
processing (soname change), openoffice.org tests with it, and then I
upload 4.4-2 to unstable, coordinate with the release team, of course.
As far as my other packages are concerned, I don't see anything
significant coming up. There is likely to be a final release of tiff
4.0 soon, but that's going to be a more significant transition that I
plan not to start until after squeeze is released. I'll contact the
release team separately about preparing for that. Maybe we can learn
from the jpeg8 transition, but I'll save the details for another
message.
--
Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>
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