Re: Integrating ICU into the Mozilla build

[Norbert Lindenberg]

On Feb 21, 2013, at 23:54 , Mike Hommey wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 03:07:59PM -0800, Norbert Lindenberg wrote:
>> On Feb 21, 2013, at 13:25 , Mike Hommey wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 01:05:44PM -0800, Norbert Lindenberg wrote:
>>>> I'd like to get some advice and feedback on my work on integrating
>>>> the ICU library into the Mozilla build. I currently have a patch
>>>> that builds ICU libraries and links them into the JavaScript
>>>> library on Mac and Windows - other platforms still to come.
>>>>
>>>> The main portions are in the configure.in and Makefile.in files in
>>>> js/src. This works and is semi-reasonable because at this point
>>>> only JavaScript uses ICU. However, it also indicates a design
>>>> problem: Normally, instructions for installing the header files and
>>>> building the libraries should be in configure.in and Makefile.in
>>>> files in the ICU source directory, intl/icu. The reason they are
>>>> not is that ICU is used for two separate and somewhat different
>>>> builds: The overall build whose main product is Firefox, and the
>>>> SpiderMonkey build whose main product is the js shell. I have not
>>>> been able to figure out how to make the second work with separate
>>>> configure.in and Makefile.in files. Any suggestions? Any other
>>>> feedback on the patch?
>>>
>>> Can't ICU be treated as NSPR? (which, btw, would also allow Linux
>>> distros to build against a system ICU)
>>
>> So how does the SpiderMonkey build actually configure and make NSPR? I
>> haven't been able to figure that out...
>
> That's the point. It doesn't. If you build spidermonkey, you need to
> build nspr yourself, or use a prebuilt one.

I had a brief discussion with JavaScript team members on IRC this morning, and there seems to be a strong preference for having ICU built by default as part of the SpiderMonkey standalone build. Note:

- SpiderMonkey by default builds without NSPR, so only people who build with the --enable-threadsafe option have to provide an NSPR library. People who do have to deal with this find it a pain.

- ICU is required by the internationalization API, which should become part of the default build, both because it's an ECMAScript standard and because it sits higher up in the stack and is therefore more likely to get broken by other work on SpiderMonkey.

Norbert

[plyf...@gmail.com]

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