Bug#490987: [aspell, dictionaries-common] VIM spellcheck

[Agustin Martin]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 09:48:42PM +0200, debian wrote:
> Package: aspell, dictionaries-common
> Version: 0.98.10
> Severity: wishlist
> 
> Hello,
> it would be great, if the myspell-files are updated the vim spell files would 
> be updated automaticly for spellchecking (new feature in vim 7.0). The needed 
> script is availlaible: "mkspell". If a vim instance is open just 
> type :mkspell /tmp/spell/en /tmp/en_US for creating the en.spl.
> the en.spl should be moved to /usr/share/vim/vim71/spell.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Neither aspell nor dictionaries-common are the right places for this. A
vim-spellfiles package was available some time ago, and relationship with
dictionaries-common was discussed and discarded at that time,

 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/dict-common-dev/2006-December/000703.html
 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/dict-common-dev/2006-December/000704.html

vim-spellfiles was later removed from the archives,

 http://bugs.debian.org/471285

after maintainer request. One of the problens was that building that package
was quite memory intensive. Also maintainer seemed to prefer vim's own method for
downloading needed spellfiles. 

IMHO, there are two other choices, create new vim-spell-LANG packages from each
dictionary or resurrect vim-spellfiles. I vaguely remember vim-spellfiles
being very slow to build, so automatically building dicts from myspell dicts
postinst seems not an option. 

I am also not much in favor of including support for yet another spellchecking
engine using yet another incompatible format. We are currently considering ispell
removal, leaving just aspell/hunspell. I would have preferred  vim spellchecking
support being done through libaspell or libhunspell (or through enchant to be
spellchecker independent) or at least reuse the same previous dictionary formats
(raw myspell or hunspell or aspell hashes), instead of a different incompatible
format (the hashes created by vim from the myspell dicts).

You may want to discuss that first with the Debian vim group,

 http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-vim/

or directly through the corresponding mailing list

 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-vim-maintainers

Anyway, since there is nothing aspell or dictionaries-comon can currently do here,
I am closing this bug report. If something more elaborated comes from the
vim group that needs help from dictionaries-common, we will reconsider this.
I am cc'ing that list to keep them aware of this thread
[I am not subscribed to the vim list, cc me on replies].

Thanks for your feedback.

-- 
Agustin