Why doesn't libicudata.so get smaller when I remove items from the data library?

Question

I'm trying to build a custom ICU with a minimal data set. I've tried to follow the instructions at Reducing the Size of ICU's Data: Conversion Tables, but many of the files referenced don't exist in the ICU 4.8.1 source distribution. Specifically, I cannot find any files that match ucm*.mk.

I've also tried creating reslocal.mk files as indicated in e.g. ICU's source/data/lang/resfiles.mk. That did not help either. My build is the typical:

$ ./configure --prefix=/some/dir
$ make
$ make install 

Regardless of what I do, libicudata.so.48.1 is about 17M. It shouldn't matter, but I'm building on Ubuntu 11.04.

Answer 1

See the note at the top of that page: (see

Note that ICU for C by default comes with pre-built data. The source data files are not included unless ICU is downloaded from the source repository. Alternatively, the Data Customizer may be used to customize the pre-built data.

Your ICU is reading the prebuilt package from icu/source/data/in/*.dat and ignoring the .mk files. We have had requests for the source data to be included as a downloadable .zip and so we plan to do this in the future.

If you have any suggestions for how our instructions can be made more clear, please file a bug. I've added a copy of that notice to the section you referenced.