New in Symfony 2.6: Farewell to ICU component

October 3, 2014 • Published by Avatar of Javier Eguiluz Javier Eguiluz

Warning: This post is about an unsupported Symfony version. Some of this information may be out of date. Read the most recent Symfony Docs.

Bernhard Schussek
Contributed by Bernhard Schussek in #11920

If you are a Symfony developer, you have probably suffered the infamous intl problem when installing or deploying Symfony applications. The following error message is the usual symptom of suffering this problem:

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Installing dependencies (including require-dev) from lock file
Your requirements could not be resolved to an installable set of packages.

Problem 1
  - Installation request for symfony/icu v1.2.x -> satisfiable by symfony/icu[v1.2.x].
  - symfony/icu v1.2.x requires lib-icu >=4.4 -> the requested linked library icu
    has the wrong version installed or is missing from your system, make sure to
    have the extension providing it.
Problem 2
  - symfony/icu v1.2.x requires lib-icu >=4.4 -> the requested linked library icu
    has the wrong version installed or is missing from your system, make sure to
    have the extension providing it.
  - symfony/intl v2.5.0 requires symfony/icu ~1.0-RC -> satisfiable by symfony/icu[v1.2.x].
  - Installation request for symfony/intl v2.5.0 -> satisfiable by symfony/intl[v2.5.0].

The good news is that in Symfony 2.6 this problem is gone forever. It doesn't matter the way you installed PHP or your specific operating system, you will never see this error again. Moreover, as this problem is so annoying, we've decided to backport it to previous Symfony versions. This means that you won't see this problem again in the new versions of Symfony 2.3 and 2.5. The issue will remain in Symfony 2.4, because that branch is no longer maintained.

"The big picture" of Symfony internationalization

To better understand the cause of this problem and its solution, it's important to understand The Big Picture of the projects and systems involved:

  • The CLDR project collects and maintains internationalization data, such as country and language names, currency metadata, number formats, postal code and phone number formats. CLDR data is used in all smartphones, operating systems and important software applications developed by companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and IBM.
  • The ICU project uses the CLDR data and builds C and Java classes on top of them, such as NumberFormatter, IntlDateFormatter, Collator and ResourceBundle.
  • The PHP intl extension makes some ICU classes accessible in PHP, but it does not bundle the CLDR data. It uses the data installed globally on the system (which is independent of PHP).
  • The Symfony Icu component includes all the CLDR data, because Symfony needs access to the data in all locales, independent of the system's configuration. We even offered different versions: if you didn't have the intl extension installed, you'd have Icu 1.0.x, which ships the data as .php files. With the intl extension, you'd have 1.1.x or 1.2.x which ships the data as binary files, readable using the ResourceBundle class.
  • The Symfony Intl component does two things: first, it provides access to the data of the Icu component (Intl::get*Bundle()->get*()). Second, it provides a partial PHP implementation for some ICU classes (NumberFormatter) which you can use when intl extension is not installed.

Understanding the problem

As you may know, Composer uses two files called composer.json and composer.lock to manage your project's dependencies. The composer.lock file stores the hashes of the package versions you have installed.

The workflow that causes this problem is usually the following:

  • Developer A, who has the intl extension, installs or updates Symfony.
  • The composer.lock file will contain the Icu 1.2.x version.
  • Developer A commits the composer.lock file to the repository.
  • Developer B, who doesn't have the intl extension, installs the project with the usual composer install command.
  • Composer tries to install Icu 1.2.x, which requires intl, and the result is the infamous symfony/icu v1.2.x requires lib-icu >=4.4 error.
  • If Developer B executes composer update command, Composer will correctly detect that intl is not installed and it will use instead Icu 1.0.x.

Understanding the solution

In order to solve this problem, the Intl component now includes all the CLDR data. As a consequence, the Icu component has been deprecated because is no longer needed.

Moreover, when you didn't have the intl extension installed, previously you could only access to the CLDR data in English. Now, you can access to all data in all locales, independent of whether intl is installed or not.

Given the large amount of information contained in the CLDR data, you may be worried by the impact in the total Symfony download size. Even if the data is stored as JSON files instead of using a binary format, the total compressed size is just about 2 MB.

Note Most of the contents of this post have been written by Bernhard Schussek, who kindly explained me all the pieces involved in the Symfony internationalization sub-framework.

Published in #Living on the edge

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Comments

Avatar of Fabien Potencier
Fabien Potencier Certified said on Oct 3, 2014
To be precise, the next version of 2.3 and 2.5 won't have the ICU problem anymore, but 2.4 has this problem and it won't be fixed as it is unmaintained.
Avatar of Javier Eguiluz
Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Oct 3, 2014
@Fabien, thanks for the correction. I've just updated the blog contents.
Avatar of Florian Klein
Florian Klein said on Oct 3, 2014
Awesome.
Is it normal that the Intl README still says:

The replacement layer is limited to the locale "en". If you want to use other locales, you should install the intl extension instead.

?
Avatar of Kristof Van Cauwenbergh
Kristof Van Cauwenbergh said on Oct 3, 2014
RIP ICU
Avatar of Christophe Coevoet
Christophe Coevoet said on Oct 3, 2014
@Florian the CLDR data are available in all locales for things like ``Intl::getCurrencyBundle()->getCurrencyNames($locale)``. but the stub implementations of PHP classes are still limited to ``en`` the CLDR data may not be enough to stub them for all locale. Some stubs may be easy to make support all locales now that the CLDR data are here, but others (like the IntlDateFormatter) would be much more complex
Avatar of Michal Piotrowski
Michal Piotrowski said on Oct 3, 2014
Hi,

I've a project based on Symfony 2.5 that needs to run on CentOS 6 with PHP 5.5.

So I've got a following deps in composer

"php": ">=5.4.1",
"symfony/symfony": "2.5.*",
[..]
"symfony/icu": "1.1.2"

IIUC after next release of Symfony 2.5 -> 2.5.6, I should remove symfony/icu dependency and it should work just fine on EL6?

Best regards,
Michal
Avatar of Edouard Garnier de Labareyre
Edouard Garnier de Labareyre said on Oct 3, 2014
Good news overload towards SF2.6 these days...
Thanks to all the contributors for the awesome work !
Avatar of Piotr Gołębiewski
Piotr Gołębiewski said on Oct 3, 2014
Thats good news. Certaintly this will improve the developer experience with symfony2. GJ!
Avatar of Bernhard Schussek
Bernhard Schussek said on Oct 3, 2014
@Michal: yes, exactly! :)
Avatar of Michal Piotrowski
Michal Piotrowski said on Oct 3, 2014
@Bernhard

Great. Thanks for fixing this!
Avatar of Frederik Schubert
Frederik Schubert said on Oct 3, 2014
Great work! When will the 2.5.6 tag be available?
Avatar of Łukasz Pospiech
Łukasz Pospiech said on Oct 13, 2014
It would be very grateful to have it as soon as possible :-) nice work!
Avatar of Julien Maulny
Julien Maulny said on Oct 27, 2014
What I have seen by updating my composer today:

- Removing symfony/icu (v1.2.2)
- Removing symfony/symfony (v2.5.5)
- Installing symfony/symfony (v2.5.6)
Downloading: 100%

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