looks like in wxwidgets that is expected and it has a vendor switch. Still ugly IMO but seems the way it's made. In ICU OTOH those soname changes on ICU are downstream hacks. I'm not sure the whole thing is a good idea anymore. Looks like the change to UTF was very intentional: https://sourceforge.net/p/icu/mailman/message/36171327/ https://unicode-org.atlassian.net/browse/ICU-13519 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=772655#c12 So there are actually programs that may crash in non-UTF8 and I don't think we actually support or test that mode in any way anymore. Catering for this one guy who insists in latin for whatever reason seems questionable.