[Dict-common-dev] ispell and ispell dicts status after lenny is released

Agustin Martin agmartin at debian.org
Wed Dec 31 14:42:22 UTC 2008


Hi,

There were some threads in debian-devel where the current and future status
of ispell was mentioned. Some people proposed to decrease the number of
spellchecking engines we currently provide in Debian, dropping ispell and
ispell dicts, some people to make them all of extra priority, and see later
what happens.

Also, ispell, iamerican and ibritish are still Standard and ftpmasters
propose to make them optional (as they should be) after lenny is released,
along with dictionaries-common (already planned, but waiting for iamerican
and ibritish to be optional) and wamerican (there is controversy about
this one, since /usr/share/dict/words is one of the things many UNIX
users expect in their systems, thus the current standard priority).

regarding ispell, there is an ispell feature that is not in either aspell
or hunspell, support for pseudo-charsets, but IIRC, that is the only one.
aspell has planned support for this, but is not yet implemented. AFAIK,
hunspell has no plans about that.

Since ispell is orphaned for some time and severely outdated in Debian, I
am considering the possibility of making ispell and all ispell dicts of
extra priority, asking ftpmasters to change the override file for that once
lenny is released. I would like first to know opinions from people in this
list, before I comment this in debian-devel to have a wider audience in case
objections arise.

Should we keep things are currently are (but with ispell+iamerican+ibritish
optional)? Sould we make them extra packages? Should we remove them all?

Opinions?

Happy New Year to all!!

-- 
Agustin



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