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

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 23, 2019, at 09:20, Daniel J. Luke wrote:

> On Oct 23, 2019, at 9:58 AM, Ryan Schmidt 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

It's not just about fixing any MacPorts ports that are using xml2-config to build static libraries. It's also about users trying to use MacPorts ports as dependencies for things they do outside of MacPorts. I don't think we should ship an xml2-config that behaves differently from upstream's.


>> 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?

I'm working on a lot of other things already, so if you or someone else can take on the task of having that dialog with them, that would be great.