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

[Agustín Martín Domingo]

Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> Hi Agustín and Domenico,
> 
> Sorry for being silent on to the present thread.  
> 
> I think that you both reach consensus about how to handle pspell-ispell
> support.  From the little that I saw, I think that it is straightforward to
> add pspell support to the dictionaries-common package.  As Agustín
> suggested, we should just require that the Ispell dictionary package
> maintainers add an extra "Pspell" (or whatever) field to the
> debian/info-ispell that would contain the part of the file name needed for
> the file /path/to/<Pspell_field>-ispell.pwli.  Using the "Hash-Name" and
> "Coding-System" fields, the contents of that file are easily determined.  
> 
> The location for the automatically generated file must be under the /var
> hierachy, as Agustín have already pointed out.  A question to Domenico: is
> it easy to change the pkgdatadir of pspell to, say,
> /var/cache/dictionaries-common/?
> 

The other possibility we were talking about is simply telling mantainers 
to add the required pwli files for each hash in the ispell dictionary 
package itself, not recreated from the info-ispell file. As a matter of 
fact if each ispell package provides the proper files at 
/usr/share/pspell there is no need to recreate anything, and thus the 
location would still be valid. By the way, that is also the location 
where aspell dicts put their pwli files, and they are 'real' package 
files, no autogenerated ones.

I think this other possibility is much simpler and straighforward, 
requiring only a minor change in policy and of course rebuilding the 
dictionaries.  From my point of view, recreating everything each time a 
new dictionary is added is an unnecesary extra complexity.

If we can in addition make things easier adding to installdeb-ispell the 
possibility to install such pwli files automatically, better, but we 
must keep in mind that each single package can install more that one 
hash (see e.g. inorwegian), and so may need more than one pwli file.

> In order to implement this idea, I will try to hack the installation script
> of dictionaries-common as soon as I have some free time (may take a while,
> though, since I am busy right now).  Once the pspell feature is added, we
> will have to update in the Policy document and to rebuild of all the
> dictionay packages in the staging area.
> 

I would not touch the installation scripts for this, but think about a 
good way to make installdeb-ispell more clever about this. This could 
be done using a new field in the info-ispell file, but used to 
automatically generate and install the pwli files during package build, 
not during package install.

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