On 28/4/16 18:11, Jeff Muizelaar wrote:
Do we use any of the OS specific parts of ICU?

I don't know.

But even if we don't, I suspect that once they drop support for XP / 10.6, it won't be long before the project as a whole becomes increasingly difficult to build for those targets, as it'll start assuming support for compiler and/or runtime library features that aren't readily available there.

JK



-Jeff

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 1:00 PM, Jonathan Kew <jfkth...@gmail.com
<mailto:jfkth...@gmail.com>> wrote:

    We make considerable (and growing) use of ICU for various aspects of
    i18n support in Gecko.†

    The ICU project is proposing to drop support for Windows XP and OS X
    10.6 in version 58; I guess this will be released sometime shortly
    after Unicode 9.0, which is due to appear in June.

    Markus (in the message forwarded below) mentions October 2016; I
    assume that's when they expect to end support for ICU 57.

    So we need to decide how we're going to respond to this. Some
    options for consideration:

    (a) Adopt ICU 58 when released, and drop Gecko support for WinXP and
    OSX 10.6.

    (b) Keep Gecko on ICU 57 and Unicode 8.0 until .... when? AFAIK, we
    have not made any firm decisions regarding EOL for Firefox on these
    platforms.

    (c) Keep Gecko on ICU 57 code, but update its data files to support
    Unicode 9.0. This would take some effort on our side, though
    _probably_ not very much.

    (d) Push back against the ICU proposal to drop these platforms, and
    see if we can convince them to delay it. (No guarantees, though at
    least they're asking. If we had a specific end date to propose, I'd
    guess that might help our case.)

    In the case of either (b) or (c), we'd also need to take
    responsibility for handling any critical security issues that are
    discovered that affect the no-longer-maintained version we'd be
    shipping (e.g. by backporting fixes from the latest upstream version).


    Thoughts?

    JK


    † Except on Android, where we maintain separate code to support some
    features; others are simply missing.


    -------- Forwarded Message --------
    Subject:        Re: [icu-design] [icu-support] Drop Windows XP and
    OSX 10.6
    support
    Date:   Thu, 28 Apr 2016 08:55:55 -0700
    From:   Markus Scherer <markus....@gmail.com
    <mailto:markus....@gmail.com>>
    To:     icu-design <icu-des...@lists.sourceforge.net
    <mailto:icu-des...@lists.sourceforge.net>>
    CC:     ICU support mailing list <icu-supp...@lists.sourceforge.net
    <mailto:icu-supp...@lists.sourceforge.net>>,
    Jonathan Kew <jonat...@jfkew.plus.com <mailto:jonat...@jfkew.plus.com>>



    On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 4:30 PM, Steven Loomis <s...@icu-project.org
    <mailto:s...@icu-project.org>
    <mailto:s...@icu-project.org <mailto:s...@icu-project.org>>> wrote:

         Jonathan and other users,
           Please comment on whether dropping Windows XP for ICU 58 will
         cause significant problems.
           We discussed this for 57 (as per below) but no code changes
    were made.


    For ICU 57, we were just thinking of removing some Windows XP-specific
       synchronization code. We decided to just keep that for 57.

    For ICU 58, we are looking at switching more code over to Windows
    Vista/7/8 APIs because Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 only support
    i18n APIs with LCID parameters and cannot support some languages at all.
    Newer Windows versions added APIs that take language tag strings. This
    is important for an i18n library on a major platform...

    For how long do you plan to support Windows XP past October 2016? Could
    you stay on ICU 57/CLDR 29/Unicode 8 until you stop supporting
    Windows XP?

    Also, Windows Vista seems to have very low market share and seems to be
    getting dropped by vendors around the same time they drop XP.
    Is it ok to skip Vista and set Windows 7 as the new base for ICU 58?

    Best regards,
    markus


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