[Dict-common-dev] Please consider waiting for aspell fixing #772415 before uploading new aspell dictionaries

[Agustin Martin]

Hi,

I am writing to warn aspell dict maintainers (aspell dict packages bcc'ed,
sorry for the dups) about a problem we noticed in current jessie aspell.
This problem is not RC, so a fixed aspell will not go into jessie, but
will be uploaded after the release.

In summary, if your aspell dictionary builds and installs directly from
official aspell dict sources (directly or indirectly via debhelper
dh_aspell sequence), please wait for aspell fixing #772415 before uploading
new versions of the package. 

In this case, current aspell will lead to xx.dat file be installed under
/usr/share/aspell instead of /usr/lib/aspell, and this will stop working in
the future. Last time I checked I found no aspell dictionaries with xx.dat
in /usr/share/aspell, but doublechecking is very much apreciated.

If your aspell dictionary explicitly builds and installs all dict related
stuff in /usr/lib/aspell, just keep doing things that way and to stay in
the safe side please check that this happens after new builds.

The long explanation follows, for those interested.

One of the things that were added to aspell for semi-multiarch support was
the possibility of real decouple of aspell's data-dir and dict-dir
variables. Default data-dir was set to /usr/share/aspell and dict-dir to
/usr/lib/ispell. Dictionaries already included all stuff under dict-dir
(including xx.dat) and this worked with aspell-autobuildhash and is still
the expected setup.

At that time I did not notice that aspell dictionaries building directly
from aspell sources will install all dat files (including xx.dat) under
/usr/share/aspell. This will work with this change, but is not consistent
with previous setup where all dict stuff is put at /usr/lib/ispell and will
fail if change below is implemented.

When #772415 (aspell expects en.dat in /usr/share/aspell but it is in
/usr/lib/aspell) was reported I noticed that it was a matter of luck that
aspell-autobuildhash was working well with that setup, it included a
workaround for an ancient problem with aspell that helped the hash build
process to find xx.dat under /usr/lib/aspell. But this will not work in the
standard way of building hashes outside of aspell-autobuildhash, unless
--local-data-dir is explicitly used (which should not be needed).

We have been discussing in http://bugs.debian.org/772415 how to best deal
with this, and tend to think that making data-dir and dict-dir point to the
same /usr/lib/aspell dir is the best approach (while lib-dir still points to
the multiarch dirs). We still need to do some extra tests here.

Thanks a lot for your patience,

Regards,

-- 
Agustin