ICU sweeping upgrade: bug or feature?

[Andrea Venturoli]

Hello.

Today I started some ports' upgrade and icu went from 50.1.2 to 52.1.

As soon as this happened, lots of applications are not working anymore.
E.G.

> % firefox
> XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so:
> Shared object "libicui18n.so.50" not found, required by "libxul.so"
> Couldn't load XPCOM.



While everything is recompiling (which will take several hours, since at 
least FireFox, ThunderBird and LibreOffice, among others, are affected), 
I am left wondering what went wrong: usually backup libraries are kept 
in /usr/local/lib/compat/pkg...

So:
> # cd /usr/local/lib/compat/pkg/
> # ls |grep icu
> libicudata.so.50.1.2
> libicui18n.so.50.1.2
> libicuio.so.50.1.2
> libicule.so.50.1.2
> libiculx.so.50.1.2
> libicutest.so.50.1.2
> libicutu.so.50.1.2
> libicuuc.so.50.1.2

I have an idea:

> # ln -s libicui18n.so.50.1.2 libicui18n.so.50

Now:
> % firefox
> XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so:
> Shared object "libicuuc.so.50" not found, required by "libxul.so"
> Couldn't load XPCOM.

Hmmm... so, to make it short:
> # ln -s libicudata.so.50.1.2 libicu
> # ln -s libicudata.so.50.1.2 libicudata.so.50

and Firefox and LibreOffice are starting again.



Hope this can help someone.
OTOH I would have expected this to happen automatically; shouldn't it?

  bye & Thanks
	av.

P.S.
> # uname -a
> ... 10.0-RELEASE ... amd64