[Development] Does Qt 5.6 still depend on ICU?

[Alexander Nassian]

As far as I know Chromium also depends on ICU and without WebKit or WebEngine you may but need not to use ICU. But I sadly don't know if and what features are (internally) missing if Qt is not built with ICU - for our applications we always have to build it with because of WebKit/WebEngine.

Beste Grüße / Best regards,
Alexander Nassian

> Am 07.05.2016 um 23:25 schrieb Roland Winklmeier <roland.m.winklmeier at gmail.com>:
> 
> Dear Qt Devs,
> 
> I'm currently preparing installers for a cross platform application
> (Win, Linux, OSX). I have investigated, which dependencies apart from
> the Qt5 libraries themselves are need to be shipped as well. But I'm a
> bit confused about the role of ICU.
> 
> From wiki pages  (https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_5.6_Tools_and_Versions and
> https://wiki.qt.io/Building_Qt_5_from_Git), I understood that, ICU is
> only required for QtWebkit. I also learned that the ICU version shipped
> in Qt 5.6.0 is 56.1.
> 
> However, I found the following facts a bit inconsistent:
> * Windows is actually shipping 54.1 instead of 56.1. Was the upgrade
> missed or is this on purpose? To me it is a minor issue, but I'm curious.
> * Official Windows QtCore binary is not linked against ICU libraries (at
> least from what I can see in dependency walker). Does it link at runtime?
> * Official Linux QtCore binary in contrast is linked against ICU
> (verified with ldd).
> * Official OS X QtCore binary again is not linked against ICU.
> 
> Now my question:
> Is ICU mandatory for all platforms or maybe only for Linux? Ideally I
> could just skip shipping it in my installer, since I'm using a custom
> Qt5 build on my Debian server (I did not yet manage to use the official
> installer on a headless server with an install script). But I want to be
> sure, what features I'm loosing before any decision. ?
> 
> *guess mode on*
> I guess, ICU was shipped previously because of QtWebkit. Since QtWebkit
> is no longer shipped in official installers, could ICU also be removed?
> I know what ICU is, but why is it shipped without linking against it?
> *guess mode off*
> 
> Cheers Roland
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