[Releasing] ICU support in QtCore and QtWebKit

[morten.sorvig at nokia.com]

On Sep 12, 2012, at 11:19 AM, ext Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
 wrote:

> On quarta-feira, 12 de setembro de 2012 06.02.22, morten.sorvig at nokia.com 
> wrote:
>> On Sep 11, 2012, at 1:45 PM, ext Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
>> wrote:
>> How does the ICU dependency affect app deployment? If app developers
>> configure with -icu-system, will they run into  he same issues as we did
>> with our binary packages?
> 
> If it affects our binaries, it affects theirs too. The deployment tool will need 
> to include the ICU libraries (the namespaced ones) into the application's 
> bundle.
> 
> But I might have jumped the gun. Are the ICU libraries present in the SDKs 
> that you can select for building on Mac OS X? That is, if I select 10.6 as the 
> minimum version, is there an ICU library that is selected along with it? Or do 
> the Mac OS X SDKs only apply to the CoreFoundation framework and what's above 
> it?

It is included with the SDK. However, Qt 4 supports building with the latest SDK and deploying back to earlier versions (using weak linking). I don't want to break this feature in Qt 5 because of the ICU dependency.  I think we have two options:

a) Always configure with -icu-qt on Mac
b) Make Qt work with the ICUs on 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.x. [1] has some insight there. Perhaps the incompatibilities are manageable on OS X? Can it be relied on to always be there in future Mac OS versions?

(This does not help app deployment on the other unix platforms of course, which I was also worried about.)

Morten

[1] http://blog.lukhnos.org/post/6441462604/using-os-xs-built-in-icu-library-in-your-own-project