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

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 2:48 pm, Michael Catanzaro 
<mcatanzaro at gnome.org> wrote:
> Sometimes distros make exceptions (e.g. for WebKitGTK, which is 
> special due to very high number of CVEs), but ICU does not warrant an 
> exception. There are probably hundreds of applications using ICU in 
> distros, if not more. Who knows what might break!

Also, sadly ICU does not maintain a stable API or ABI. So every 
application and library using ICU would need to be rebuilt and updated 
at the same time. Then the update would break any custom software that 
users have using the system ICU. Such an update would go badly... 
probably would wind up in tech news once people notice the breakage.

WebKitGTK can be updated because we maintain stable API/ABI.