WL: libicu

[NJ Johansson]

The excellent php intl extension you bundle (e.g. php54-intl, php55-intl) is dependant on the system's installed ICU library libicu (http://site.icu-project.org/).

This means that even if I with your help can run a recent PHP version on for example a RHEL 5 machine, it will still use a very outdated ICU library. E.g. RHEL 5 has ICU version 3.6 (released 2006-09-01) and RHEL 6 has ICU version 4.2.1 (released 2009-07-01).

On RHEL 5 this means my intl extension can't for example provide me with the country name of country code RS (Serbia) due to this:
> var_dump(Locale::getDisplayRegion('und-RS', 'en'));
string(2) "RS"

On a RHEL 6 machine this would give:
> var_dump(Locale::getDisplayRegion('und-RS', 'en'));
string(6) "Serbia"

Would it be an option for ius to start bundling recent versions of libicu and declare php-intl's dependency against that package to keep things up-to-date?

How to determine ICU version:
$ php -i | grep "ICU version"
ICU version => 3.6

$ rpm -qi libicu | grep Version
Version : 3.6 Vendor: Red Hat, Inc.

[bharper (bharper)]

Hello NJ,

Thanks for taking the time to submit this request. With all new package requests, we evaluate if it would be a good fit for IUS and if it is maintainable with our current resources. Also note that maintaining our current work load does take priority over new packages. I'll look into this request and update this bug once there is additional information.

-Ben

[bharper (bharper)]

Hello NJ,

Generally, IUS builds on top of stock libraries and we try not build a whole chain of dependencies. We have made some exceptions in the past with mixes results. That being said, I have looked into building an updated libicu. The libicu is a sub-package of the icu package. The icu package has a build requirement for a newer version of autoconf (2.68) that comes in RHEL .

In the past we have packaged autoconf26x (2.63) as it was needed for python26, python31 and rsyslog4. All of these packages are only available for EL 5 along with autoconf26x. Both python26 and rsyslog4 are EOL and ptyhon will only be providing source-only security fixes for python31 till June 2014. Once python31 reached EOL, we were also going to EOL our autoconf26x package.

Looking over IUC's documentation, I am concerned about an update breaking applications deploy on stock iuc. See the 'How do I upgrade to a new version of ICU? Should I be concerned about API changes, a new Unicode version or a new CLDR version)?' section of the following:

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

I might have considered getting an updated version of libicu into php55u before it first hit the stable repos.

-Ben

[bharper (bharper)]

We are moving bug/ticket/issue tracking from Launchpad to GitHub[0]. All stale tickets within Launchpad are getting closed. If you would like us to re-evaluate this request, please create an issue in our GitHub wishlist repository[1].

-Ben

[0] https://lists.launchpad.net/ius-community/msg01635.html
[1] https://github.com/iuscommunity/wishlist