[Development] ICU and Windows

[Koehne Kai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: development-bounces+kai.koehne=digia.com at qt-project.org
> [mailto:development-bounces+kai.koehne=digia.com at qt-project.org] On
> Behalf Of Thiago Macieira
> Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2013 6:42 AM
> To: development at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Development] ICU and Windows
> 
> [...]
> Also note that the data library is only an inconvenience now because we
> have duplicated data: the Unicode tables and CLDR locale data are in ICU and
> in QtCore. Once we remove our own copy of that data, the total size would
> be reduced.

True, but Qt5Core.dll is about 3,6 MB for me (5.0.1/MSVC 2010 32bit), while icudt49.dll is 17,5 MB. So the size gain by stripping out things from Qt5Core can't be really big.

> I also think that we should configure ICU on Windows to reduce its data size:
> we don't need all of it.

That is what we should do indeed. I learned from

http://userguide.icu-project.org/icudata

that one can also ship the ICU data in separate .data files, located in a "ICU data directory" that can be specified e.g. at compilation time. So how about creating a bare minimum icudt.dll, and rather ship .data files in a well-known place ($$[QT_INSTALL_ICU])? This would allow anyone with enough knowledge to tailor what exactly they want to ship, while reducing the footprint of "I don't care about localization for hello world" types of applications.

I've to say I'm not at all into Unicode/ICU. Anyone else want to take this up?


Regards

Kai