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>
To: icu-design <icu-des...@lists.sourceforge.net>
CC: ICU support mailing list <icu-supp...@lists.sourceforge.net>,
Jonathan Kew <jonat...@jfkew.plus.com>
On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 4:30 PM, Steven Loomis <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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