Hi Michael,

what is the central message of your email? Is it just to say "I gave
up, sorry", or do you need help at specific points? :-)

At least I can tell you that I have quite a bunch of work-in-progress
branches lying around because I start with "Oh, let's _just_
update/fix/add this little program ..." and you end up in a chain of
needed updates, conflicting updates, broken states, etc.

Don't get confused by this :-) I try to plan my work step by step in
these situations, cleanly commit what's finished and write a personal
log of the success and failures and intermediate knowledge gained.

To the concrete java-icu4j:

What do you think about the attached patch (needs some clean-up)?

What's a bit uncommon about the project is that it builds separate
sub-projects and then combines them. I'm not sure about the output(s):
There are icu4j.jar, icu4j-charset.jar and icu4j-localespi.jar, I only
copied the first one as I think this is what the original package
definition did.

Björn