Bug#860895: Please prefer hunspell over other alternatives

[Nicholas Steeves <nsteeves@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 03:06:27PM +0200, Laurent Bigonville wrote:
>
> The different tasks are install aspell and ispell. These spelling
> engines seem deprecated and replaced by hunspell (other distributions
> are consolidating around hunspell, see links bellow).
>
> Shouldn't the (main) language tasks recommends hunspell dictionary and
> demote to suggests (or remove completely) the dictionaries for aspell
> and ispell?
>
> enchant also prefere hunspell over other engine, I opened #860888 to
> reorder the dependencies against the dictionaries.
[...]
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ConsolidateSpellingLibs

Did enchant ever become a viable option for a system spellchecker?

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/aspell-announce/2011-09/msg00000.html

>From what I've read about the emergent popularity of hunspell, this
was due to its more liberal licensing terms needed for embedded
spellcheckers vs calling an external program.  Here is the first
example provided by a popular search engine:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/aspell-and-hunspell-a-tale-of-two-spell-checkers/

This article recommends aspell for programmers, because it can
spellcheck camel case words; however, it also claims that hunspell
tends to give better suggestions for natural language typos:

http://blog.binchen.org/posts/what-s-the-best-spell-check-set-up-in-emacs.html

I also believe that hunspell is the future, I'm just not yet convinced
that it as surpassed aspell's accuracy for English and French.  If
someone has the time to survey the currently available literature, or
do a study of their own, and if he/she finds that hunspell is better
then I'll give it a try asap.

And if that goes well you'll have my vote 100%!

I am also very interested what the I18n team has to say this, or about
the possibility of defaulting to the best spellchecker available
per- whatever language chosen at the time of installation, whether
directly or via enchant.

Sincerely,
Nicholas