[Dict-common-dev] Re: FYI: New spell packages

[Agustín Martín Domingo]

> * Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@computer.org> [2002-06-21 16:19]:
> 
> 
>>Fine. I'll join the dict-common-dev list.
> 

Let us know when you subscribe to avoid ccing to you


Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

> 
> This is a debatable issue, for sure.  However, the Debian people tend to be
> quite conservative and such a change will face a quite strong opposition, I
> guess.  I fully understand your point, but if the only benefit is template
> searching, that is too few to have the change adopted.
> 
> 
> 
> Again, I do not see any sensible benefit in changing the names of packages
> now.  This will only bring headaches.  The situation may be different,
> however, if somebody has a really strong argument for the name change.
> 

Adding more to this, in a previous incarnation of the policy (that was 
never adopted) we used  a more descriptive naming scheme, e.g, spell-ga 
would have been named idict-irish-gaelic, spell-gd idict-scottish-gaelic 
and so on. But we found strong opposition from maintainers who claimed 
that those changes would strongly confuse users that expect the 
classical names in Debian.

Since after the dict-common system has been redesigned to its current 
shape the only real advantage of this naming scheme is that all ispell 
dicts appear together in dselect and friends (and the same with 
wordlists, using prefix 'words-') we found that to be a very little 
benefit compared to the opposition we found. So we finally decided to 
keep the old names.

That also makes some things in the transition easier  (there is no need 
to worry about old emacsen files provided by old-style packages, a 
package like 'miscfiles' can provide a wordlist without requiring 
package split and other issues).

If at some time other reasons for a more descriptive name appear I would 
prefer something like we used (either with ispell- or idict- prefix) to 
the language locale name. This latter can even be more confusing, see 
e.g. the norwegian package, that provides ispell dicts for two written 
versions of norwegian, bokmal (with locale 'no') and nynorsk (with 
locale 'nn'). Using locales would not be as clear as inorwegian or 
idict-norwegian, as a matter of fact it would force package splitting. 
As Rafael told you, the system has currently tools to provide the same 
funcionallity as the locale naming scheme without using that scheme.

Cheers,

-- 
=====================================================================
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