ICU Core meeting 2006-Feb-15

attending: Markus, Vladimir, Doug, George, Ram, Steven, Deborah, Eric, Andy (note taker)

Schedule for Maintenance Releases ICU4J 3.4.3, ICU4C 3.4.1

These releases will contain time zone changes & bug fixes.  Hope to release before IUC, in the next few weeks.

UText Iteration Boundary or Limits proposal

Support for limiting a case mapping to a substring like range of text.
Add a setter and getter to UText for start & end of iteration ranges.
Andy will make an API proposal.

UText getIndex / setIndex, or Mark / return to position

Deborah is concerned about the speed of getIndex or getOffset,
and the ability to mark and return to a position efficiently.
Concern with function call overhead on getNativeIndex() in the pure UTF-16 case

Markus: A less safe setNativeIndex() could also speed things up
by bypassing the code point boundary test. ResetNativeIndex()

Markus suggests a getPosition that returns/sets some sort of
struct that optimizes returning to a postion.

Deborah: MoveIndex32 could be more efficient, even without
being a macro. It's making too many function calls.
Markus notes that this is an implementation detail, no API consideration.

Markus suggests an optimization for MoveIndex32,
if the provider could signal that there are no supplementary chars possible,
a bunch of checks could be eliminated.

Andy to send Deborah a note with comments on the MoveIndex32 optimization suggestions.

UCaseMap adopt/release of the embedded break iterator.

Decision: Setter adopts the break iterator, getter returns a live const pointer
to the embedded BI. No cloning of the break iterator.


Tools Questions: the future of ICUSwap, gencmn, decmn

Should the old tools be removed immediately, or should there be a grace period?
Should all ICUSwap functionality be embedded into icupkg?
Should old tools be emulated by a script that invokes icupgk?
Deborah: keeping old tools alive creates a maintenance issue.
Steven: wants ability to swap individual res files (for use with ICU4J)
decisions:
Markus will assess adding ICUswap functionality to icupgk, do it now if easy.
icuswap, gencmn, decmn will be maintained in ICU (built, installed)
for a grace period of one release.
Each obsolete tool will produce warnings on use.

Thai Dictionary Integration (Deborah)

Deborah will work with Steven in integrating the Thai dictionary builder tool into ICU.
Deborah will provide documentation of the dictionary binary format
comparable in detail to descriptions for other ICU binary formats