[Dict-common-dev] pspell, pspell-ispell, aspell and dictionaries-common

[Agustín Martín Domingo]

Domenico Andreoli wrote:
  >>
  >
  > this module needs to know the charmap used somewhere in the wordlist.

I guess here wordlist stands for ispell dict

  >
  > this info was used to be taken from a pspell-ispell maintainer provided
  > list. for obvious reason it should be provided by the dictionary
  > maintainer.
  >
  > i see the new policy talks also about this in the info file provided
  > by new policy compliant dictionary packages. anyway it is optional
  > while pspell-ispell requires it. what about mandating it? what about
  > a update-ispell build also the pspell-ispell required configuration
  > files with the provided charmap?
  >

Using only that "Coding-System" field is not that straighforward.

     On the one hand is needed more info than the contents of this field,
since also the two characters name of the language is required, as in 
the british line of make-ispell-pwli

british:      en-british          iso8859-1

     On the other hand, the "Coding-System" field of the info file is
intended for emacs ispell.el, who currently allows only iso-8859-1,
iso-8859-2 and koi8-r charsets. As a matter of fact I am not sure of the
role of this field in ispell.el, since I can spellcheck esperanto latin3
texts with emacs, even if the entry for it is put as iso-8859-1 (It did
not allow me to put iso-8859-3). That means that putting other values in
that field will make ispell.el fail. Having such low number of
possibilities is probably a bug in ispell.el

I see three possibilities:

(a) Adding a new field named for instance 'pspell-pwli' and rebuild the
     pwli files from it. Not all entries should have this field, for
     instance for spanish there are two emacs entries castellano and
     castellano8, but only the first would have that entry.
(b) Add some lines in policy telling that ispell dicts maintainers must
     look at a global file where all pwli entries are and verify if there
     are proper entries for their ispell dictionaries. In that case
     update-default-ispell should check for make-ispell-pwli existence
     and run it if present.
(c) Add to policy that ispell packages have to provide such file for
     each dictionary in the package. I think this is what aspell
     dictionary packages do and put the responsability about this on
     maintainers rather than in a common support.

One comment, I see that make-ispell-pwli is in /usr/share/pspell and 
that the generated pwli files are generated in that directory. Is that 
policy compliant? I assume that normal location for such autogenerated 
files is under the /var hierarchy, but may be I am wrong. Note that
this would not be a problem in case of (c).

My personal preference is somewhat towards (c), since I find it simpler, 
but I would like to know other points of view.

Cheers,

Agustin

-- 
=====================================================================
Agustin Martin Domingo, Dpto. de Fisica, ETS Arquitectura Madrid,
(U. Politecnica de Madrid)  tel: +34 91-336-6536, Fax: +34 91-336-6554,
email:agmartin@aq.upm.es, http://corbu.aq.upm.es/~agmartin/welcome.html