On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 09:54:48AM -0400, K.S. Bhaskar wrote:
> [KSB] Thank you, Charles. This is is a handy feature that I was not
> aware of!
Debian is cool, isn't it? ;-)
> The first question is: should the GT.M package require ICU (International
> Components for ICU) or should it recommend it?
We would simply trust your decision. If you consider GT.M as dependant
from libicu we use Depends. However, a Recommends is de facto quite
strong. If a user does not explicitely exclude recommends these
packages will be installed anyway. So you should probably answer the
question: Can you imagine any real application where GT.M should run
without libicu. If the answer is yes, use Recommends to give the admin
a chance to avoid libicu. For all practical cases a Recommends is
sufficient.
> The reason for recommending ICU but not requiring it: for people
> developing applications that are strictly ASCII based (all characters in
> all strings that the applications handles are single byte with the high
> order bit 0), ICU support is unnecessary overhead. For applications that
> are pure English can use pure ASCII and not care.
>
> The reason for: if ICU is not required, those developing applications
> that are not pure ASCII may be tempted to use ISO-8859 variants that have
> the high order bit set to 1 instead of using UTF-8. Given that there is
> not a single ISO-8859 variant that works for all European languages, if
> there are applications that use languages other than English, requiring
> ICU encourages those application developers to use a better character
> encoding.
IMHO as long as you are dealing with peoples names you always have to
respect non-ASCII characters even in pure English environments.
> The second question is: for ICU support, should GT.M require or recommend
> libicu## or should it require or recommend libicu-dev?
There are only "Build-Depends" (and no Build-Recommends) - so this is
simple.
Kind regards
Andreas.
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