One of the
big arguments against bringing it in then (because it worked) was that
we'd bring in another compile time dependency that's actually larger
than PostgreSQL itself.
Magnus: I don't see how this is a problem as long as using ICU is *optional*. On systems with a working strcoll there is no problem with using the stdc functions (except that ICU might offer more collations).
Jakob, including the patch in PostgreSQL.app seems pretty reasonable. There's is only a small fraction of ICU that is used, a couple of libraries I believe.
Palle: The ICU libraries themselves aren't that big, but the required data files (also packaged as a dynamic library) are big (around 25MB uncompressed). However, I'd rather increase the download size by 30% than ship a broken database.
Best regards,
Jakob