Thursday 9 January 2020

ICU version in Ubuntu 20.04

Dear Ubuntu developers,

I'm a member of the ICU TC (International Components for Unicode).  Developers frequently get ICU from the apt-get package "libicu-dev".

We have a special ICU release coming out in March/April, ICU 66.  This release is "special" because it has an emphasis on stability and compatibility with ICU 65, released in October, except that it also includes the latest Unicode 13 standard, which will be released around the same time.  Our plan with ICU 66 is so that platforms like Android can adopt this release in a relatively late stage with minimal disruption.

I wanted to ask whether Ubuntu 20.04 would also consider picking up ICU 66 as libicu-dev.  Since it is an LTS release, users would benefit from having Unicode 13 available in their server applications over the lifetime of Ubuntu 20.04.

Shane