[Slackbuilds-users] RFC: SlackBuild to Install Newer ICU to /opt

[Lumin Etherlight]

Hello, friends,

        I just submitted icu4c-opt, which installs a
  newer version of ICU to /opt.  The goal is to have
  it available  for packages that require  ICU newer
  than what is in  base Slackware.  Packages such as
  WebKitGTK, whose upgrade is blocked by lack of ICU
  modern enough  to build  it.  This version  of ICU
  installed to  /opt allows  us to  build WebKitGTK,
  and possibly other packages, by adding the library
  path /opt/icu/usr/lib64 to their -rpath at linking
  phase.  I've been running  the latest WebKitGTK as
  the backend for my suckless surf for the past week
  by doing this, and it seems to be working well.

        Note that packages  like WebKitGTK also link
  against other packages that depend on ICU, such as
  SQLite3, and thus, the final binary will link both
  the new ICU  and the old ICU, but that  is not any
  problem, because ICU symbols  are versioned in its
  shared objects.  For example, running:

        objdump -T /usr/lib64/libicuio.so | less

  would show symbols like:

        [...]
        _ZN6icu_6913UnicodeStringD1Ev
        ucnv_toUnicode_69
        u_charsToUChars_69
        [...]

  where 69 is the version  of ICU in base Slackware;
  the build installed to  /opt shows 78 instead.  We
  can't install  the new ICU package  to /usr/lib64,
  despite this though,  because the package contains
  binaries, C headers, and pkg-config files, that do
  conflict with Slackware's  base ICU, installing to
  /opt seems to be the saner option.

        Feedback and suggestions  are welcome.  Once
  this script is hopefully published, I will work on
  cleaning up my latest WebKitGTK SlackBuild, and we
  can have an up-to-date version available.  The ICU
  SlackBuild was tested on clean Slackware installs,
  fully-patched,  for both  64bit and  32bit.  Still
  doing more testing on WebKitGTK, its builds take 6
  hours each, at least, so it's been tedious :)

  Thank you all~

Best Regards,
Lumin Etherlight