[Pkg-parrot-devel] Parrot 4.0.0

[Allison Randal]

On 03/22/2012 03:54 AM, Alessandro Ghedini wrote:
> 
> I have just tried to build nqp with 4.0.0 but it fails some tests
> because it needs ICU support. Would it be possible to enable ICU in
> Parrot (simply adding libicu-dev to Build-Depends should do)? I have
> tried it locally and everything seems to work fine with it.

Happy to do so. Note that ICU is a 33MB install dependency, which is a
significant addition to the size of a Parrot install. But, on most
Debian desktops/servers, this is tolerable. (It's mainly install media
and embedded environments that would struggle with the increase in size.)

In exchange, is there anything I can remove from the Parrot packages,
now that you're compiling nqp as a separate package rather than using
the (older) version bundled into Parrot? I understand that nqp still
uses the PCT libraries in Parrot, but that it might not use the PGE
libraries anymore? It certainly doesn't use the TGE libraries, never
did, so I probably will go ahead and remove those. Some of the other
libraries in the parrot-devel package are also suspiciously
Perl6-specific (like P6Regex and P6object), so if NQP/Rakudo aren't
using them any more, it doesn't make sense to keep them.

> Also FYI, #641213 [0] is still valid (but it is nqp who needs those files
> now), not sure if you want to do anything about it.
> [0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=641213

I've mentioned that a general parrot-runtime package doesn't make sense
(these libraries don't really have anything to do with the Parrot
runtime, they're just optional pieces for language implementors). But I
could create specific binary packages for certain module sets. Like,
perhaps libpct-parrot for the PCT libraries, if you need it.

Allison