Bug#401969: please build using hunspell

Mike Hommey mh at glandium.org
Sat Dec 9 18:33:25 CET 2006


On Sat, Dec 09, 2006 at 06:10:16PM +0100, Rene Engelhard <rene at debian.org> wrote:
> Mike Hommey wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 09, 2006 at 02:29:36PM +0100, Rene Engelhard <rene at debian.org> wrote:
> > > Mike Hommey wrote:
> > > > On Sat, Dec 09, 2006 at 01:13:27PM +0100, Rene Engelhard <rene at debian.org> wrote:
> > > > > I do. There's hunspell dictionaries in Debian which have to conflict
> > > > > against all mozillas...
> > > > 
> > > > I fail to see why. Are the hunspell dictionaries in
> > > > /usr/share/myspell/dicts or what ?
> > > 
> > > Yes.
> > 
> > If the dictionaries are not compatible with myspell, why put them in
> > /usr/share/*myspell* ?
> 
> Has its reasons lying in the past.
> 
> a) everything using myspell looked at this place and I of course wanted
>    hunspell to look there where all myspell dicts are since they are
>    100% compatible and there are more myspell dicts there than "new"
>    hunspell dicts
> b) OOo supports only *one* dir and *one* dictionary.lst for this.
>    This could have been worked around by symlinking myspell dicts into
>    /usr/share/hunspell/dicts, but more importantly, every dictionary has to be
>    registered at /etc/openoffice/dictionary.lst. Which, due to OOo not caring
>    about the FHS at all, is in /etc and /usr/share/myspell/dicts/dictionary.lst
>    (where OOo expects it) is a symlink to that. Not to forget the
>    additional xx-YY.* -> xx_YY.dic symlinks you might want/need only for
>    mozilla. (Note also that /usr/share/myspell/dicts isn't even sensible to set at
>    OOo either, you need a symlink pointing to that, too)
>    (/usr/lib/openoffice/share/dict/ooo -> /usr/share/myspell/dicts).
>    This would have been a maintenance nightmare.
> c) when hunspell (the ui interface) would look in /usr/share/hunspell it
>    would not find any myspell dict unless you do the symlink farm from
>    b)
> d) if you did the symlink farms in b) and c) the DSDT policy needed to
>    get changed and every myspell package updated/NMUed. I didn't want
>    to go that far yet...

On the other hand, all packages using myspell dictionaries and not
supporting hunspell format will fail to load the dictionaries that are
in /usr/share/myspell/dicts that are hunspell dictionaries.

> e) I hoped Mozilla upstream would adopt Hunspell quite fast (as they did with
>    MySpell) in which case this wouldn't have been a problem after all.
>    After I saw they didn't I sent the patch we're discussing about now
>    only because you don't like static libs.

There has already been a patch sitting in their bugzilla to replace
myspell with hunspell for a while.  Note that they're not very in using
external libraries, so if your patch doesn't include hunspell and links
against an external library, it's not likely to be accepted. And even if
it were accepted, the best target you could expect would be Firefox 3.

Mike




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