[darcs-users] new libicu dependency

Reinier Lamers tux_rocker at reinier.de
Sun Feb 21 16:33:26 UTC 2010


Hi all,

I'd like to come back to the ICU dependency introduced by the UTF-8 patches, 
to settle this well in time for darcs 2.5.

To summarize the problem for those that don't remember immediately:
The UTF-8-enabled darcs applies Unicode normalization to the metadata strings 
before storing them, so that equivalent characters are always encoded in the 
same way. To do this, it uses the ICU library. This ICU library is not on 
hackage. This causes problems especially for Windows people, because they 
can't just get an ICU from their package manager.

My proposed solution is to accept that "cabal install darcs" is going to be 
hard on Windows, and supply a Windows Installer package for Windows users.

The reasons are the following:
  * Windows Installer is even easier than "cabal install", especially to
    non-Haskellers.
  * Darcs is a version control system, not a Haskell toy. Being reliable and 
    bug-free is more important than being cabal-installable.

This, of course, assumes that we have the knowledge and manpower to make 
Windows Installers. I have some experience making installar packages with WiX 
(http://wix.sourceforge.net/). Is anyone else able to help out with this?

It also assumes that ICU can be used from Haskell at all using Windows. A 
quick Google search turns up that it can be built using MSVC or Cygwin, but 
MinGW appears to be unsupported. So it should be possible to link with MSVC-
compiled code from GHC. http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell-
cafe at haskell.org/msg59508.html about building text-icu on Windows suggests 
that it's possible. Can some Windows Haskeller confirm that?

Reinier
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