Re: [eclipse-dev] Do we still need ICU4J?

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

+1 to remove ICU4J as much as possible. As far as I know, it doesn't bring any value we cannot get for "free" otherwise, and comes with a non-negligible cost on maintenance, bandwidth and disk space. So it just looks like plain technical debt, which would be profitable to get rid of (at least on long term).

> Just to make sure - no I don‘t think one needs icu4j today in 99% of the cases but because it is on our API contracts the better option is to invest into icu-base

Maybe deprecating such API contracts relying on undesired components would be more profitable.

We could start by adding right now an @Deprecated on all classes that exports some ICU4J types in their signatures.

> JDT can move away from it as it doesn't depend on databinding

+1, less coupling gives more agility. Migrating JDT to not using ICU4J could probably also drive to provide better alternatives into the databinding APIs.