topic Re: OpenVMS port of ICU in Operating System - OpenVMS

OpenVMS port of ICU

ptrskg — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:52:55 GMT

Hi,

I'm looking for an OpenVMS port of the ICU (International Components for Unicode) package.

The background is that we have a multi-platform software(c-written) that currently is able to do character translations between several 1-byte code pages including EBCDIC and we want to extend this to cover most of the Unicode, ucs-2 and 4, utf-8 to 32, including the Asian languages variants. And EBCDIC.
I have looked at iconv, both the one distributed with OpenVMS and libiconv(GNU), but they don't cover all the variants we want.

I have also looked into the OpenVMS Xerces distribution that I believe have some relation with ICU but I can't find any useful lib or sharable.

Does anyone know of an ICU port or have knowledge how hard it can be to do your own port?

Thanks
Peter

Re: OpenVMS port of ICU

Hoff — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:19:02 GMT

If you have support, directly ask HP to add this; that's the model that HP increasingly appears to seek to operate, where you work directly with them for these requests.

Here's how to add your own character translation tables into the I18N environment that's available with VMS when the I18N kit is installed, if that's of interest:

http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1637

And for completeness, there are the LIB$TRA_ASC_EBC and LIB$TRA_EBC_ASC calls in the library, and also see the OpenVMS NCS library in the OpenVMS documentation.

There are various tools to perform this translation available via the OpenVMS Freeware and old DECUS tapes, as well.

Re: OpenVMS port of ICU

Craig A Berry — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:00:12 GMT

I took a quick look at building it awhile back using the Unix build scripts and GNV. What it fell down on was the very old version of GNU make included in GNV. The ICU docs explicitly state, "You need GNU's make program version 3.8 or later" and I believe the configure script explicitly checks for that and bails out if it doesn't find it. 3.8 is pretty ancient, but the 3.78.1 version included with GNV is even more ancient and didn't pass muster. There has been one GNV update since then, so it's possible this situation has been corrected.

This was a pretty thin failure reason and shouldn't be too hard to work around if you have an urgent reason to do so. I didn't so I didn't. The library code should be very portable given that it runs on all sorts of things, including z/OS.

Re: OpenVMS port of ICU

H.Becker — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:23:14 GMT

In 2006 I did a port of ICU4C 3.2.1 to I64. Other than the C and C++ compilers I only used GNV. The build needed some manual intervention. As far as I remember, I added a couple of linker options files, changed some build files and a few C sources.

Re: OpenVMS port of ICU

ptrskg — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 04:46:43 GMT

Thanks a lot for the comments and encourage by your answers I will try to do the port.
If somebody have more input to this it would be appreciated.

Thanks
Peter

Re: OpenVMS port of ICU

dodger_1 — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:14:27 GMT

Hello Peter,

i am searching for an ICU Port.

Did you work on a port and probably finished? Or have you found another solution for your problem?

Greets and Thanks, Simon