ICU development team meeting
Time: 10am-11am PDT, 1pm-2pm EDT, 19:00-20:00 CET
Date: 2001-aug-08

Attendees:
    Andy Heninger (IBM)
    George Rhoten (IBM)
    Markus Scherer (IBM)
    Jim Snyder-Grant (Lotus)
    Tex Texin (Progress)
    Raghuram Viswanadha (IBM)
    Syn Wee Quek (IBM)
    Vladimir Weinstein (IBM)

Minutes taker: Markus Scherer

Agenda items:
- oss server status
  + Markus: The oss server is transitioning from one old machine to four new ones.
    Due to network problems, the DNS system is not updated, so that oss.software.ibm.com
    still points to the old machine.
    Since the services (mailing lists, CVS commits, etc.) have not been shut down, the servers
    are getting out of sync now.
    We hope to get this resolved as soon as possible.
    It is likely that the new servers will initially not have Jitterbug installed, so that
    we will have to use the old server's Jitterbug temporarily. (Under a different URL.)

- User Guide sources & build process
  + Markus: The User Guide is currently maintained with XML sources.
    We have a Java-based Apache stylebook build system that generates
    HTML and PDF output from these XML sources.
    This gets us a PDF document that is easy to download and print and looks nice.
    However, editing the contents requires to use the stylebook DTD
    and to use low-level XML or plain text editors.
    We cannot simply export text from other formats like Word.
    The stylebook PDF generation is also buggy and does not support non-Latin-1
    characters.
    Outside contributions of documentation require a manual conversion to XML.
  + Markus/Andy: How about changing to HTML sources that would be directly used
    on the web site.
    Pro: Export to HTML is widely supported, visual HTML editors exist.
         We could provide a .zip file for easy download.
         Each HTML document would be a reasonably large chapter to minimize
         navigation and to make it easy to print a chapter.
         Printing in one piece could be done with browser print options like
         "print all linked documents" in IE.
    Con: No nice PDF any more.
  + Tex: Strongly for easy download & printing.
    HTML is ok, .zip for download is fine.
    PDF could be generated from HTML, just not as nicely.
    Word could be considered as another output format.
    HTML documents need to have full-topic length.
  + Jim: Not aware that anyone in his Lotus team is using the PDF.
    They always use the HTML pages.
  + Markus: Sounds like HTML could be done, need to talk with Helena and
    check about internal processes.

- Proposal to deprecate C++ classes Unicode, UnicodeConverter, BiDi
  + Markus: These three classes are very thin wrappers around C APIs with
    no added value.
    UnicodeConverter has a couple of UnicodeString-related convenience functions
    that would be moved to UnicodeString member functions.
  + Tex & Jim: Ok.

- Euro in ICU 2.0 locale data
  + Markus:     My proposal was to just change in ICU 2.0 the locale data to contain the Euro sign
    for the 12 Euro countries and to remove the _EURO variants.
    Feedback from inside IBM is inconclusive. JDK 1.4 (IBM and/or Sun?)
    will switch regular Euro country locale data from legacy currency symbols to
    Euro at 2002-01-01 00:00 local time. (This is dangerous!)
  + Tex: Prefers to not change anything in case applications expect the locales to
    be the way they are now.
    Appalled by the JDK 1.4 hack.
    Tex worries that applications might tag currency values with locale ID
    and get wrong results if the locale data changes.
    Suggests to add explicit _LEGACYCURRENCY or similar variants, so that
    software does not need to rely on fr_FR but can explicity select the
    _EURO or legacy variant.
  + Andy: Cannot imagine that any "serious" application would rely on
    locale data for currency symbol formatting at all because of the chance
    to get wrong results. Locale ID tagging would be very dangerous.
  + Markus: Any application that deals with currencies will probably need to
    make some changes for the Euro transition no matter what data ICU contains.
    Also, ICU data can be easily changed by applications shipping with ICU so that their
    copy contains exactly the data that the application needs.
  + Tex/Jim to look for their groups' strategies with regard to the Euro,
    Markus to check the Microsoft web site and IBM-internal information.