readme.txt
1#
2# Copyright (C) 2017 and later: Unicode, Inc. and others.
3# License & terms of use: http://www.unicode.org/copyright.html
4#
5# Copyright (C) 2010, International Business Machines
6# Corporation and others. All Rights Reserved.
7#
8# created on: 2010jun04
9# created by: Markus W. Scherer
10
11These tools parse Unicode Character Database files and generate
12data files (text, source code and binary) for use in ICU.
13They are used during the Unicode beta period and after a Unicode release.
14
15For a log of actions and changes for recent Unicode version upgrades of ICU, see
16https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/main/icu4c/source/data/unidata/changes.txt
17
18Since the Unicode 5.2 upgrade, these tools have been moved out of the ICU source
19tree to here. They have not been fully tested and probably need some more work
20and setup. They might benefit from additional shell or Python scripts.
21
22There are autoconf makefiles (Makefile.in) and Visual C++ project files (.vcproj)
23in the subfolders. They are copied over from the ICU source tree and will not
24work without modifications. However, I started to use CMake (CMakeLists.txt)
25which is much simpler, and if it works well enough then I plan to just
26delete the old makefiles and project files. The CMake files should
27work on Linux and MacOS X.
28I should use more variables to make the CMake files more portable, and should
29use ICU's installed icu-config or Makefile.inc to get the values for these
30variables.
31(If and when ICU itself uses CMake, we should be able to point to its modules.)
32
33Things will improve as I work on Unicode 6...
34
35markus
36