How to handle ports that are still broken because of the icu upgrade

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Oct 23, 2019, at 9:58 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> On Oct 23, 2019, at 08:56, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
>> On Oct 22, 2019, at 9:49 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>> Or does the port use libxml2? If so, it may be using a bad method of finding libxml2. One bad method of finding libxml2 is using the xml2-config script.
>> 
>> Should we just patch the xml2-config we distribute (and attempt to push those changes upstream) instead? http://www.xmlsoft.org/FAQ.html tells people to use xml2-config (so I suspect other upstream projects will be reluctant to include patches that switch from using xml2-config to pkg-config).
> 
> That would break anything trying to build static libraries with it.

:(

It's probably less work to fix the (rare) use case of building static libraries than the (common) case of dynamic linking with libxml2

> We should push upstream to change the documentation to recommend pkg-config and to explain the problems for dynamic linking when using xml2-config.

Unfortunately, the libxml2 port doesn't have a maintainer - do we need a volunteer to contact them about this to try to get it updated?

-- 
Daniel J. Luke