IBM's ICU library suffixes every symbol with a major and minor version string. eg. "_2_6". This makes it impossible for binary compatibility even between successive *minor* versions of ICU. Therefore dev-libs/icu needs slotting for 2.4, 2.6, 2.8 and (whenever its added to portage) 3.0 and 3.2 releases. I filed this bug because dev-lisp/cl-icu (a Common Lisp UFFI binding for ICU) needs ICU 2.6 currently, but it is really a general ICU slotting problem.
Yeah, the libs definitely are easily slotable, but all the binaries, includes, and man pages would need some custom stuff. There's relatively few consumers of the ICU stuff in portage currently, including mono (ergo me looking at ICU stuff), so versioning all these should be doable without breaking too much. I'll look into it when i find time.
Upgrading to the new icu-3.2 breaks nearly every mono package that uses this library, halting any update attempts in the process. Those packages require icu-2.8, which now makes slotting or masking a requirement. This should be bumped to major.
Anthony: Does mono actually not compile with icu-3.2? Yes, ICU definitely needs slotting, but until then, you should be able to recompile mono against the newer ICU and have the problems go away. *mono* is the only thing that links to the ICU libs, but the problem manifests itself in any ebuid that uses mcs to compile, etc. None the less, i'm going to bump this up priority wise on my list of things to do.
Reassigning this ancient bug to the current maintainers. This is still a very valid problem, as you can see with the current bump to icu-3.6: This broke the install for all openoffice 2.0.4-users and forced them to rebuild it. If you know OOo, you'll also know how unfortunate that is.
Okay... Andreas, if you are willing to do this, feel free to add yourself to metadata.xml and have fun. While this might be convenient in future, nothing in the tree currently requires this to be slotted and there's just 3.6{,-r1} left in the tree so there's nothing to slot actually. Last but not least, PHP herd is understaffed and in fact doesn't need this thing at all until PHP6 hits the tree. Marking LATER for the reasons stated above.
