ICU for Rakudo on Debian

[Jonathan "Duke" Leto]

Howdy,

> Okay, sounds fine. ICU is 33 MB installed, compared to Parrot's < 2MB
> install size. Not a big deal for the average Debian install, but
> definitely something to keep in mind for making it a universal requirement.

I am hesitant to make ICU a hard dependency, because it may not be available on
mobile/embedded systems and/or people may not want to use it because it adds
too much to the memory footprint. Anybody have data on the memory footprint
of a Parrot interp with and without ICU?

On the other hand, this may be what we need to justify having "flavors" of
Parrot. At the least, we need a "desktop" flavor and an "embedded" flavor.

The "desktop" flavor could basically be the "embedded" flavor with
more libraries/etc thrown in.

I envision that we will then show people how we built each flavor and give them
the tools to build their own Parrot flavors. I see this as a key differentiator
and killer feature.

Duke


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Jonathan "Duke" Leto <jonathan at leto.net>
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