Re: NSCalendar and NSLocale support

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

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?

This is a typical dilemma. Usually I am a friend of having the smallest 
set of dependencies possible. I checked and ICU is for example readily 
available in gentoo (if not, I would have really worried) but it is not 
for example available on sunfreeware, this tells me that it is not that 
widespread.
It is not something like libjpeg or limxml then.

I don't know the library. If you need only parts of it for what you need 
it could make sense just to write everything inside gnustep. Another, 
very welcome option, is to have a check at configure so that if not 
available there is a working fallback written implementation but to get 
all the features an bells&whistles you need the library.

One of the thing I like of GNUstep is that it is very portable. Old 
machines as well as new ones, 32bit and 64bit, sparc, x86, HP-PA, m68k, 
ppcm, arm and MIPS. Unix and windows. You can be only portable if your 
libraries you rely on are portable too...

I gave you here only very general ideas of course.

Regards,
  Riccardo