Thanks for the reply. Our release schedule is tied to Unicode 13, which is being released on March 10, 2020. We can't release ICU before Unicode 13 is out.
I think it would be useful for Ubuntu LTS users to have Unicode 13 available. It contains new scripts and emojis that are increasingly useful to developers. That's why we are specifically making a small ICU release, ICU 66, to follow Unicode 13. It is really more like 65.2, but we are increasing the major version number because the Unicode version is changing.
Note that we already have an ICU 66 preview release.
So, it comes down to whether you (the Ubuntu devs) agree that it would be valuable to have Unicode 13 in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. If you do, the ICU team is doing our best to make a non-disruptive release to make it available. If you don't think Unicode 13 is valuable for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS users, then there's no need to integrate ICU 66.
Shane
On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 7:23 PM Dimitri John Ledkov <xnox@ubuntu.com> wrote:
On Fri, 10 Jan 2020 at 12:26, Shane Carr <shane@unicode.org> 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
boost1.71 is ongoing at the moment but progressing well.
After that, I will perform icu upgrade to 65.
April is too late, and so is March. In the future, please release in
January to be included in the Ubuntu LTS release.
Depending on how well transition to 65 goes; and how early you can
release 66; it may or may not make it into 20.04 LTS.
--
Regards,
Dimitri.
