Re: Which spell checkers to include by default?
On Tue, 25 Dec 2007 12:17:52 +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> said:
> [Manoj Srivastava]
>> Are these packages a drop in replacement for ispell?
> None of the spell checkers are drop in replacements for the others.
> Each program need to have support for ispell, aspell, myspell and/or
> hunspell. This is why I want us to try to get as many packages as
> possible to switch to hunspell, to make it possible to drop ispell
> completely.
>> I suggest we have a look at how many other packages are impacted, and
>> what it would take to effect these changes, before the decision is
>> taken to drop ispell.
> Well, I would not suggest to drop ispell, so we do not have to check
> the effect of dropping it for my sake. Dropping ispell will take too
> long and slow down the process of changing the default spell checker
> without any advantages.
> What I do suggest is to change the list of default packages and dropp
> the spell checker from that list, and announce our intention to move
> to hunspell as the default spell checker used in Debian. The packages
> that still use ispell, aspell and myspell will still work until we are
> able to get them to switch to huspell, and each will have to be
> changed individually to switch to hunspell. For some it is a compile
> flag, for others it is a configuration setting, and for others it
> require code changes.
Umm. The part that I dislike about this is that we have an
installed base of users, and people like me who use emacs and for whom
the default installation of emacs just works. When installing new
Debian boxes I just install emacs and the standard install.
Now, we should not make it so that people who used to just do a
routine install now have a non-working setup. So, if you want things
to be dropped from standard, please think about a transition strategy
where people would not have a broken setup when they upgrade, or do a
fresh install.
One solution, for instance, would be to modify dependent
packages like emacs to use the new standard, and make sure thay things
do not break for our users.
Just adding things to NEWS is not good enough, since the emacs
user might not be the vi using sysadmin. Not breaking user setup is
something we have a reputation for, and that is a good thing.
manoj
--
"Laughter is the closest distance between two people." -Victor Borge
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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