Bug#777694: RFA: icu -- Development utilities for International Components for Unicode
Package: wnpp
Severity: normal
I request an adopter for the icu package as I no longer have time to
maintain the package.
The package description is:
ICU is a C++ and C library that provides robust and full-featured
Unicode and locale support. This package contains programs used to
manipulate data files found in the ICU sources and is a dependency of
libicu-dev. End users would generally not need to install this package.
Additional notes:
ICU is an important library package with lots of reverse dependencies.
Upstream does two binary-incompatible releases each year, so ICU needs
frequent library transitions to be coordinated with the release team.
Upstream is good about source compatibility so usually these are easy
but sometimes they require some effort in coordination with other
packages that use ICU. ICU gets lots of security incidents, so you have
to be prepared to handle those. Usually someone else does most of the
work since ICU is embedded in some high-profile projects. ICU has a
complex internal build system with lots of code generators and other
unconventional things. This tends to make things like multi-arch,
security hardening, and other things that wrap around the build system
more complicated than in most packages. Upstream is very responsive to
bug reports and packaging considerations.
The ICU packages are in good shape right now, but we are a couple of
versions out of date now and there is some discussion over problems with
its multi-arch compliance. Resolving these issues will require some
effort.
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