[webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Olmstead, Don]

Hi Michael,

There are a couple problems with checking in a version of ICU.

* Other libraries used by WebKit have dependencies on ICU. For our ports harfbuzz, libxml2, libxslt, libpsl and CFlite all require ICU.
* ICU doesn't come with a CMake build system and its non-trivial to make one. We've largely used this https://github.com/LibCMaker/ICU_CMake_Files to handle building ICU but its use is also why ICU is the library we aren't able to update on a regular cadence.
* We aren't terribly good with updating things in ThirdParty. Sometimes this is because there aren't releases, see gtest. Others because they don't actually have releases, see ANGLE. On top of that there might be local modifications to make things work within WebKit.

Could you possibly give some overview of how WebKit is packaged by Linux distributions? I would have thought they would use flatpack/jhbuild to get the dependencies that the WPE/GTK ports are using especially if those dependencies have their own set of bug and security fixes. My experience with Linux is minimal so some context here would be appreciated.

For our ports we use vcpkg to build and manage dependencies. We host it at https://github.com/WebKitForWindows/WebKitRequirements and have an internal fork for PlayStation. I'm guessing it's probably similar to flatpack/jhbuild in terms of functionality but in our case we just use GitHub releases to have binaries ready.

Perhaps there are better ways for us to approach the requirements that would be beneficial to all ports?

-----Original Message-----
From: webkit-dev <webkit-dev-bounces at lists.webkit.org> On Behalf Of Michael Catanzaro
Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2020 10:32 AM
To: Kirsling, Ross <Ross.Kirsling at sony.com>
Cc: webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
Subject: Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit


Any objections to uploading a bundled ICU 60 under Source/ThirdParty?

Seems easier than forcing downstreams to work out bundling themselves. 
Most major distros will just stop providing WebKit security updates if we don't bundle it for them. E.g. this is sure to kill Ubuntu's current long streak of providing our updates to Ubuntu 16.04.


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