icu @73.1 can be built on PPC Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4.11, with Python 3.10

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

The result port test icu is:

ALL TESTS SUMMARY:
All tests OK:  testdata intltest iotest cintltst
verifying that icu-config --selfcheck can operate
verifying that /usr/bin/gnumake -f Makefile.inc selfcheck can operate
PASS: config selfcheck OK

It makes no sense to use a old unsupported and potentially perilous software like Python 2.7.

[catap (Kirill A. Korinsky)]

ICU doesn't really uses python at runtime, it needs it for building.

As I explain in #65870 python-2.7 is more than ok for this.

Thus, adding python3.11 will make quite tricky bootstrap of compilers because ICU is part of bootstrpa toolchain.

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

Why is it necessary to install a software for such a little effort? Why is Apple's Python not sufficient?

[catap (Kirill A. Korinsky)]

Because ICU requires python 2.7 or newer. Formally it requires 3x, but 2.7 is still supported.

macOS before 10.6 ships with python smaller version, which is incompateble with modern ICU.

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

Is it possible to apply versioning? Default Python version would be 2.7 but anyone could build it with any Python 3 version outside of a bootstrap process? Later on one could get rid of this old Python version…

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

Easiest would be to serve binary packages. To build icu on my PowerBook G4 takes two hours. Would it be such a bad idea to accelerate bootstrap a bit?

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to ballapete:

Is it possible to apply versioning? Default Python version would be 2.7 but anyone could build it with any Python 3 version outside of a bootstrap process? Later on one could get rid of this old Python version…

The icu port could offer python variants on old systems where the OS version of python is insufficient. It could default to python27 and you could select something different if you like. But if newer python ports have more dependencies, and the dependency chain gets back to icu, then you have a circular dependency. MacPorts doesn't handle those. You will get an error stating that there is a circular dependency.

Replying to ballapete:

Easiest would be to serve binary packages. To build icu on my PowerBook G4 takes two hours. Would it be such a bad idea to accelerate bootstrap a bit?

Nobody thinks it is a bad idea to offer binary packages for PowerPC, we just don't have working hardware to do that right now. See #66288.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

And, of course, if we offer python variants and you select one that is not the default then you won't receive binaries.

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

That's OK. The binary release should just satisfy the dependency for bootstrapping. Afterwards regular work starts.