packaging/PACKAGES

ICU is packaged into a number of small, interdependent packages. This
file describes what these packages are, what their name should be
like, and what their contents are. It is useful as a reference and a
guide when packaging ICU on a new system.

+ List of ICU packages.

ICU is distributed as the following packages:

- ICU libraries. This package contains the runtime libraries needed by
applications that use ICU. All the other packages require this package
to be installed.
- ICU. This package contains the converters data, the timezones data,
and all the ICU tools.
- ICU locales. This package adds locales and break data.
- ICU development. This package contains the files necessary to build
applications that use ICU, i.e. header files, links to shared
libraries used by the linker, static libraries, etc... It also
contains sample applications and documentation.
- ICU docs. This package contains further documentation for ICU,
including a complete API reference.
- ICU data. This package contains the source for the compiled data
contained by the ICU package.
- ICU international data. This package contains the source for the
compiled data contained by the ICU locales package.

In this file, we will refer to Autoconf variables as in $(bindir). In
addition to these, we will use the following variables to denote
ICU-specific directories or information:

  VERSION       ICU's dotted version number, e.g. 1.6.0.1 as of this
		writing.

  ICUDATADIR	The directory where ICU data are. This is defined as
		$(datadir)/icu/$(VERSION).
  ICUSYSCONFDIR	The directory where ICU configuration files are. This
		is defined as $(sysconfdir)/icu.

When referring to libraries, .so will be used to denote the extension
of a shared library, and .a to denote the extension of a static
library. These extensions will actually be different on some platforms.

+ Configuration and compilation of ICU

ICU should be configured with the following options:

  --with-data-packaging=files
  --disable-rpath
  --enable-shared
  --enable-static
  --without-samples

in addition to platform-specific settings (like a specific mandir or
sysconfdir).

The configure script invokation should also be done with

  CFLAGS="-O2"

set, as in:

  $ CFLAGS="-O2" ./configure ...

The files packaging mode is chosen because it offers the maximum
flexibility. Packages can be split easily, and system administrators
can add converters, aliases, and other resources with little
effort.

+ The ICU libraries package

The ICU libraries package is typically named `libicuXX' where XX is
the major number of ICU's libraries. This number is ICU's version
number multiplied by 10 and rounded down to the nearest integer (it is
also the value of the LIB_VERSION_MAJOR configure substitution
variable). For example, for ICU 1.6.0.1, it is 16, so the package name
is `libicu16'. The major version is part of the package name to allow
for the simultaneous installation of different ICU releases.

This package contains:

- All the shared libraries, and their major number symbolic link, but
not the .so symbolic link that is only used at link time (this one is
part of the development package).

+ The ICU package

The ICU package is simply named `icu'.  It provides data used by the ICU
libraries package and commands to create and manipulate that data.

This package contains:

- The Unicode data files (uprops.dat and unames.dat as of this writing).
- The time zones data files (tz.dat).
- All the binary data files for converters (.cnv files).
- All the ICU commands.
- The manual pages for ICU commands and file formats.

+ The ICU locales package

The ICU locales package is named `icu-locales'. It provides data used by
internationalization support in ICU.

- This package contains:

- All the data for locales in ICU (.dat files).
- All the break data for specific locales (.brk files).

+ More to be written...

----
Yves Arrouye <yves@realnames.com>