Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Bernd Zeimetz]
> I'm forwarding this orphaning bug to debian-devel as I hope this rises
> the chances to find somebody who is willing to take care of ispell.
> According to http://ficus-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/ispell.html the version
> in Debian is pretty outdated, also there's a number of bugs to triage...

Given the limitations of ispell, I would instead urge us all to
migrate all our packages to use for example hunspell and drop ispell
completely from the distribution.  It would be a lot easier to
maintain a dictionary in Debian if only one format of it needed to be
generated, and it would be a lot easier to configure a desktop to use
a given dictionary if only one package needed to be configured to use
it.

And it would be a lot easier to check spelling in any language if all
programs supported a spell checker that supported any language, and
not only the "simple" ones with a structure similar to English. :)

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen