Re: Icu4c branch

[Po Lu]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> I see a possible GPL issue here -- but since I don't know Android, I
> can't tell whether it is really an issue.
>
> What does the icu library do?

ICU provides internationalization support for the libxml2 library (which
Emacs depends on to parse XML data.)

> Does it qualify as a system library according to GPL version 3?

No.

> Are the Android.mk files source files?
> Are they omitted from recent versions of the library?

Android.mk files are Makefiles that tell the Android build system how to
build a library.  Android themselves have ommitted those files from
their source code, as they now use another build system called ``soong''
which uses a different format, but for obvious reasons Emacs can only
use the Make-based build system.

Older versions of the Android version of icu4c contain Android.mk files.