Re: virtual package for words dictionary?

["Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@kleinmann.com>]

Joey Hess said:
> Why isn't there a virtual package for wenglish, wfrench, wspanish, etc? Has
> this even been considered? 

Funny you should mention this.  Just yesterday I submitted two bug reports
on the same topic.  It appears there used to be a virtual package named
word-list; at least, some reference to this was made in ispell-3.1.18-11.  
I don't know if I've ever seen it implemented, though both wenglish 
and wgerman seem to provide a word list through a link to 
/etc/dictionary.  (I don't understand why the virtual packages
mechanism wasn't used.) 

On the other hand, it appears that there _is_ a virtual package called 
'ispell-dictionary', i.e., an ispell-dictionary package appears to be 
referenced in update-alternative commands in some other packages 
postinst scripts.

Neither 'word-list' nor 'ispell-dictionary' appears to be included in the 
list of virtual packages in the doc-debian package now.
 
I'm very confused by this whole thing, but I think this is what needs to
happen:
a) the virutal-packages name list needs to be updated to include 
   "word-list" as well as "ispell-dictionary".  Then the doc-debian package
   needs to be updated to include the new virtual-packages name list.
b) both the wenglish and wgerman packages need to implement the
   virtual package mechanism to provide word-list.
c) the bsdmainutils (and possibly other programs) need to refer to 
   "word-list".

If someone could verify that the above conclusions are correct, I'll
enter additional bug reports for (a) and (b), or feel free to do it 
yourself.  I've already sent a report about (c).

Susan Kleinmann