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

[Joshua Root]

On 2019-10-24 01:20 , Daniel J. Luke wrote:
> 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?

Certainly including indirect dependencies' libs in the dynamic case is
just as incorrect as leaving them out in the static case. And the former
impacts modern systems a lot more.

It seems to me that xml2-config should either grow a --static flag (or a
--dynamic flag if they really don't want to break backward
compatibility) or be officially deprecated for use with dynamic linking.

- Josh