[Dict-common-dev] New Hunspell/MySpell policy for lenny - Discussion / final try

[Agustin Martin]

On Sat, Dec 30, 2006 at 09:22:40PM +0100, Rene Engelhard wrote: 
> Agustin Martin wrote:
> > What the Ice/Moz people intend for the future? If every myspell app is
> > moving to hunspell, I would avoid the intermediate /usr/share/myspell step
> > and move every myspell dict to /usr/share/hunspell once this happens, unless
> > there is already a real hunspell dict available, where myspell dict package
> > should just be removed. In the meantime conflicts and symlinks are OK.
> 
> Apparently there's a patch in Moz's bugzilla for Myspell support.
> and there's patches for Iceape and Iceweasel already in  the BTS
> (the Ice* people are going to apply them once Hunspell has a shared lib)
> 
> When anything using MySpell migrated to Hunspell we can get without
> /usr/share/myspell, yes.

I have noticed that hunspell with the shared lib stuff has been uploaded to
experimental. So, I suppose that in a reasonable timeframe after etch is
released there will be no need for standalone myspell.

> 
> > > Question: Should Hunspell dicts and MySpell dicts for the same language
> > > still conflict? Or should there only be a symlink from the hunspell to
> > > the myspell directory if there only is myspell dictionary available?
> > 
> > This depends. If myspell and hunspell dicts are to coexist in different
> > places because there are apps that require one of them, and that is not to
> > vanish in a reasonably near future, we can either make them conflict
> 
> ... which is what we currently do ...
> 
> > or plan a symlink based stuff at e.g. /var/lib/hunspell pointing to
> > /usr/share/hunspell dicts or, if unavailable for that language, to
> > the equivalent /usr/share/myspell dict.  hunspell should look for dicts
> > there.
> 
> Hmm, yes, that could be solution.

I have been playing with update-openoffice-dicts to be able to read infos
from two places with a defined priority. This was more in the
'/var/lib/hunspell' way supposing myspell and hunspell dicts are installed
in different places, but having the capability does not harm, even if it is
finally disabled. I will probably open a dictionaries-common branch to start
testing changes before etch is released.

Forgot to mention that I proposed /var because /usr might be mounted
read-only at dpkg-reconfigure time. However, since everything seems to be
really moving to hunspell control, I think we should wait and use
/usr/share/hunspell as destination for both myspell anf hunspell dicts, with
appropriate conflicts. myspell dicts having matching hunspell dict will
eventually disappear.

There was other possibility I was considering (unfortunately, I am not the
one to code it). Have you seen, when browsing other distros, any code to
make hunspell support multiple search paths in a defined priority? That
would help us a lot to make the transition smooth (with a search path like
/usr/share/hunspell:/usr/share/myspell/dicts), and might be useful even
later (think of something like
/usr/share/hunspell:/usr/local/share/hunspell). In parallel, I considered
filing a feature request on hunspell-sf about this, but did not do before
knowing other opinions.

> > I would not go that deep for the infos. Since they are Debian only,
> > something like /usr/share/ooo/infos should suffice. I am not proposing
> 
> Good idea. That would also make it vanish from the "real" dir.
> (I'd use /usr/share/openoffice (sic!), though, probably)

That is OK for me, but I would still leave the infos subdir (thus using
/usr/share/openoffice/infos), just in case we need to hang something else
from /usr/share/openoffice.

Happy New year to all,

-- 
Agustin