[Dict-common-dev] News from the Debian dictioneries-common project

[Agustin Martin Domingo]

Hi all,

Some changes in the dictionaries packages. Depending on which you want
to use and how you do things, you might need to set versioned
dependencies or build-dependencies. Setting dependencies to
dictionaries-common (>=0.16.0) and build-dependencies (if required) to
dictionaries-common-dev (>=0.16.0) is a safe choice when required.

* Some new possible entries for the ispell info-ispell file,

   debconf-display
   emacs-display
   jed-display

   The only value that will do something is "no", meaning that the
   corresponding entry is not to be displayed by debconf, emacs or jed
   menus respectively. Anything else, including its absence means 'yes'.
   To be used with care in some special cases.
   Needs a versioned dependency (for {emacs|jed}-display) and/or build
   dependency (for debconf-display if you use dictionaries-common-dev).

   Regarding ispell dictionaries emacs entries please make sure that
   the encodings used there are supported by all emacs flavors
   currently shipped. Otherwise ispell-dictionary-alist creation will
   fail, affecting all dicts, not only the offending one.

* New debhelper like installdeb-myspell script. Will take care of
   installing the info-myspell file and debhelper snippets for the
   maintainer scripts and set the mozilla compatibility symlinks. If
   called with the --srcdir=dir option will install the .dic and .aff
   file found there (with name extracted from the info-myspell file).
   Needs a versioned build dependency.

* Some changes in the .config templates for ispell dictionaries and
   wordlists. They allow 'dpkg-reconfigure your_package' to work as
   expected. They also deal better with templates containing extra
   leading/trailing whitespaces. Please rebuild against fixed
   dictionaries-common-dev if required. Needs a versioned build
   dependency unless you do not use the debhelper like scripts
   and do things manually.

* abiword is now using a new portable spellchecking library, enchant. It
   is intended as a successor of pspell and currently support more
   backends. Current Debian ispell dictionaries are compatible with
   enchant, but it will look for them at /usr/share/enchant/ispell/
   directory and with the names, locales and encodings given in

   http://dict-common.alioth.debian.org/dsdt-policy.html#enchant-ispell

   If at some time we migrate to the new ispell, this compatibility will
   be lost. Seems that some changes in the enchant ispell files will
   at that time return that compatibility back, but this will need more
   testing to be sure before messing everything up. For now, putting a
   symlink at the enchant ispell directory to your dictionary hash at
   /usr/lib/ispell will make it available to enchant, e.g.

   /usr/share/enchant/ispell/espanol.hash ->
                                      /usr/lib/ispell/espa~nol.hash

   using the names found in the above link (taken from ispell_checker.cpp
   in the enchant sources). [bcc'ing also enchant maintainer]

If you did not subscribe to the dictionaries-common-dev mailing list, do
not worry, we did not subscribe you, you are just being bcc'ed as 
maintainer of Debian ispell dictionaries, wordlists or related software. 
Please reply to the list (if you maintain ispell/myspell dicts or 
wordlists you are also suggested to subscribe) and not to me.

Happy New Year

--
The dictionaries-common people