ICU it not provided in Windows binary builds

[rogerbinns]

This ticket is to centralise and discuss this one issue

[rogerbinns]

I don't see any way this can be practical:

• ICU is not standard on Windows, so you can't assume its presence
• Once installed, there is no standard version that is installed or standard location, so APSW binary build would have to be adaptable in a way that isn't possible
• APSW can't include ICU itself, because which version, where to install, which compilation choices etc
• APSW would have to compile ICU because they only provide a binary distribution compiled with VS2010. Things will only work if Python, APSW and ICU are compiled with the same VS version.
• ICU is humungous. Their src directory is 200 times larger than APSW, and 11 times larger than SQLite. Their DLLs are almost 30MB.
• Even if the above was surmountable, it would add a lot of time to the Windows build process. It looks like I'd have to build ICU about 7 different ways (compiler versions and 32 vs 64 bit). Then I'd need to run test suites to verify the builds. ICU does a release about every 6 months, so I'd have to absorb a new ICU version about that often too.

It would be nice, but I don't really see it happening.

[rogerbinns]

No solutions, so closing. Sorry.