Re: NSCalendar and NSLocale support

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 13 Jun 2009, at 16:38, Dave MacLachlan wrote:

> Hey there...
>
> I'm looking to add NSCalendar and NSLocale to Foundation. I'm happy  
> to implement them, but I was hoping to do it on top of ICU (http://site.icu-project.org/ 
> ).
>
> Are we willing to add a dependency on ICU to gnustep?
>
> The ICU license is GNU GPL compatible...
>
> http://userguide.icu-project.org/icufaq#TOC-How-is-the-ICU-licensed-
>
> Or perhaps I should be looking somewhere else?

The project has had to put up with a lot of (undeserved) criticism  
about having too many external dependencies in the past, so we really,  
really try to avoid them where possible.  That being said, we also  
want to avoid re-inventing the wheel, so if NSCalendar and NSLocale  
really need a lot of code (I haven't looked at them enough to know if  
this is the case), then using an external library is not a show stopper.
The sort of things we use external libraries for are, SSL support, XML  
(though libxml2 is optional and may be phased out), jpeg (and other  
image formats), X, etc.  We don't use them unless they are bringing a  
lot of value and/or would require a lot of expertise to implement.

Licenses would need to be LGPL compatible (not GPL), and we are aiming  
to move from LGPL2 to LGPL3 at some point, so it would not make sense  
to adopt something which was compatible with LGPL2 but not LGPL3.  I  
don't know how ICY fits with this.