ICU Core Meeting Notes

March 21, 2007

Attending

Doug Felt
Deborah Goldsmith
Steven Loomis
Michael Ow
George Rhoten
Markus Scherer
Yoshito Umaoka
Ram Vishwanadha
Vladimir Weinstein

Scribe:  Andy Heninger

Announcement:  
Ram is leaving IBM, and will not be substantially participating in ICU development in his new position.

ICU 3.8 Milestone One Status
We have a clean build for ICU4C.  Will SVN copy it to tags.  Make up a name.  3-7-1
For ICU4J there are build system issues, probably due to the day light savings time change.  Code is clean, to the best of our knowledge.  Will try to get a check build through today.  Haven't run exhaustive tests yet.

ICU4JNI will not be in the milestone.

Date/Time Duration Formatting, Ticket 3487
Doug has some prototype code, which he has sent to Yoshito.
Trying to understand requirements for this feature...
Doug:  Two parts, gathering the data and building the structure.  Depends on languages to be covered, what the structure required will be.  Locale data does not exist in CLDR at this time.
Mark:  CLDR 1.5 has data for a range of dates.  Not really the same thing, but is related.
Mark:  CLDR is in favor of doing time durations, but does not have a complete proposal to put in.  Too late for CLDR 1.5
Mark:  Would like to see as a tech preview in ICU.
All:  Additional API is needed.  API design is not dependent on the CLDR data structure.
Doug:  API design may be somewhat affected by requirements of some languages, depending on how many fields are involved.  Doug, Deborah, Yoshito are working on design.
Doug, Mark:  This feature is a natural fit for ICU.
Yoshito:  want to map ISO 8601 durations into displayable formats.
Mark:  Tricky part is in API to say what the main field, or maximum resolution, should be.   93 minutes vs. 1 hour and 33 minutes.  How to get human friendly results in context.   5 minutes, not 5 minutes and 3 seconds.
Mark:  Year, Month, days, hours, minutes, seconds only, at least first.
Summary:  For 3.8, have an API in tech preview, and support for a sampling of languages.  Possibly have feature to build at runtime from custom data.  Full data, from CLDR, will need to wait for a follow-on release.


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