clarification about glibc-libidn and a little proposal...

[Julio Meca Hansen]

Hi,

In the glibc installation step in section 6.9, we say the following:

[quote]
The glibc-libidn tarball adds support for internationalized domain names (IDN) to Glibc. Many programs that support IDN require the full libidn library, not this add-on (see http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/libidn.html). Unpack the tarball from within the Glibc source directory: [...]
[/quote]

Maybe we should add a comment about what kind of programs will expect the libidn library instead of the glibc add-on. Anyway, I would like to propose a debate about this, and I mean:

[quote]
Libidn can be built into GNU Libc to enable a new system-wide getaddrinfo() flag for IDN processing.
[/quote]

The question to debate about is: can we avoid the installation of the glibc-libidn package and integrate libidn instead? If it says it can be compiled against glibc maybe we could have a 'more complete' system in the sense the user wouldn't have to download it later to fulfill some program's dependencies, but I don't know if this can be done in a straightforward way (the glibc-libidn is like hundreds of kilobytes long while the full libidn implementation goes over a megabyte in size, apart from other possible considerations).

I haven't contacted Joseffson yet, but I think this could be an interesting subject to debate.

What do you think?

Julio
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