Bug#879801: ftbfs with icu from experimental

[Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org>]

On 04.12.2017 15:17, Norbert Preining wrote:
> HI all,
> 
> I have now installed icu60 in a chroot and try to find what are the
> equivalent calls to pkg-config.
> 
>>> [1] http://userguide.icu-project.org/howtouseicu
> 
> Interestingly, and I am far from sure that this is correct, is that
> pkg-config returns *nothing* on --cflags
>   $ pkg-config --cflags icu-uc icu-io
> 
>   $ pkg-config --libs icu-uc icu-io
>   -licuio -licui18n -licuuc -licudata
> This is with current experimental.
> 
> In contrast, current sid, what we use for TL building:
>   $ icu-config --cppflags
>   -I/usr/include 
>   $ icu-config  --ldflags-searchpath  --ldflags-libsonly --ldflags-system
>   -L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu -licui18n -licuuc -licudata -lpthread -ldl -lm   
> 
> Trying to mimic this with pkg-config seems to be a bit tricky.
> 
> I am not sure whether replacement of
>   icu-config --cppflags
> with
>   pkg-config --cflags icu-uc icu-io
> and 
>   icu-config --ldflags-searchpath  --ldflags-libsonly --ldflags-system
> with
>   pkg-config --libs icu-uc icu-io
> is enough, but I will try out at some point...
> 
>> For other reasons, the actual transition needs months (I expect it in
>> February, 2018) thus you have time to make the switch.
> 
> Just one last idea ... icu-config is *still* shipped with upstream. 
> It would be nice if either you or upstream provides a concise guide how
> to transition to pkg-config, instead of unilaterally removing icu-config
> from Debian.
> 
> Thanks for your understanding

one idea would be to ship icu-config in icu-devtools for now, iff you can keep
icu-devtools M-A: foreign.  That might require some hacking in removing standard
paths from the shell script.