The ICU entry was inherited from the original package-name check (libicu-dev
on apt, libicu on dnf) and translated to a library probe without verifying
which library that should be. Three things were wrong with it.
libicui18n was never checked. The strings in libSystem.Globalization.Native.so
are exactly libicuuc and libicui18n, so probe both; libicudata arrives as a
dependency of libicuuc and the remaining ICU libraries are never referenced.
The probe accepted any SONAME down to .so.0, but the runtime's floor is
MinICUVersion 60. A host carrying only an older ICU passed the check and then
FailFast'd at startup. RHEL/CentOS 7 ships ICU 50 and is affected.
The ldconfig fast path bypassed the version range entirely, since a cache line
for libicuuc.so.50 still matches the "libicuuc.so" prefix, and it trusted a
stale cache: removing a library without refreshing the cache reported it
present. Drop it and ask the loader directly. dlopen consults the same cache
but answers the question we are actually asking, so this also removes the musl
special-case, where ldconfig exits 0 while producing nothing usable.
Add tzdata. It is data rather than a library, so no loader probe finds it, but
the event scheduler resolves configured zone IDs through TimeZoneInfo and
without /usr/share/zoneinfo every lookup except UTC throws. Slim containers
routinely omit it.
Move the rationale to dev-docs/platform-prerequisites.md so it is discoverable
without reading the build tool, covering what each dependency is for, why
InvariantGlobalization stays false, and the tzdata-legacy split on Debian 12
and Ubuntu 24.04 that hides aliases such as US/Eastern.
README no longer asks for libicu-dev. Matching the runtime package by pattern
('^libicu[0-9]+$') is version-independent without pulling in headers, so no
-dev package is required on any supported distribution.
Verified on Debian and Alpine: all present, each dependency removed
individually, a stale ldconfig cache, and ICU downgraded to .so.50.
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