Thanks for the reply. I see two other posts in this thread, one from Dimitri on Feb 5 and a response from me the day after; perhaps they are still stuck in the mailing list moderation queue?
ICU 63 is the Fall 2018 release, which doesn't even have Unicode 12, let alone Unicode 13. The current release is ICU 65, from Fall 2019, and ICU 66 is scheduled to release on March 10, and it is intended as a non-disruptive release that adds Unicode 13 support without any other feature changes. Note also that we already have an ICU 66 Preview release, which should be binary-compatible with the final ICU 66 release, if you want to get a head start integrating it.
What it comes down to whether the Ubuntu devs agree that it would be valuable to have Unicode 13 in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. If you do, then the ICU team is doing our best to have a non-disruptive release to make it available.
Shane
On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 11:23 PM Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com> wrote:
Hi Shane, I didn't see a reply on-list, perhaps there is a thread in the background. Thank you for reaching out, and in case you haven't had a response, Dean will know the right person to consider the matter. It's late but not *that* late, the question will really be backwards compatibility and testing given that the current libicu63 has 140 things that depend on it. Given your comments on stability, that seems a reasonable thing to consider.
Mark
On 10/01/2020 04:42, Shane Carr wrote:
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
