Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))
On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 08:49:20PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
>
> [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 in Debian is pretty outdated, also there's a number of bugs to triage...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.
Each spellchecker has currently some special features. Fortunately, the
only thing where ispell is stronger than the other spellcheckers (support
for pseudocharsets like 'a, "a, \'a, ... ) is already included in aspell
development version, so at that time we can drop ispell without any loss
of features. Not sure about hunspell here.
> 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. :)
Regarding aspell vs hunspell, choice is more difficult. aspell has planned
support for hunspell .aff files and combined flags like hunspell, but I do
not know exactly what is the current status. IIRC aspell has stronger
support for deformatters, and interacts better with things like emacs,
because can be asked for some things that make ispell.el work better.
Cannot speak about other details, but aspell and hunspell maintainers may
want to provide additional info.
--
Agustin
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