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Re: Htdig's english wordlist



On Mon, 8 Oct 2001 19:25, Stijn de Bekker wrote:
> I've just taken over the htdig package and now I'm going through the
> outstanding bugs. My question relates to bugs #74523 and #104607.
>
>
> The htdig package uses an english wordlist which is now located in
> /etc/htdig/ - just a list of english words. Changing this file changes
> the behaviour of htdig. According to the Debian policy, it should
> therefore be a conffile (11.7.1):

The file(1) command has a database of patterns for recognising files which 
has been traditionally stored in /etc/magic.  This is too large file to be 
the only conf file (merging changes with uploads would be painfil) so it uses 
/usr/share/misc/magic and /etc/magic starts off empty and is used for the 
local sysadmin to add any necessary customisations.

Perhaps something similar should be considered?  You could have the main 
wordlist somewhere under /usr/share and then let the sysadmin edit a file in 
/etc to add extra words (I presume that typically people don't want to remove 
words just to add new words).

> The htdig wordlist is 930 kB and pretty big for in /etc. The package
> wenglish contains a similar list of english words, only smaller (45392
> vs 87536 words).

Firstly, why not have htdig depend on wenglish and use it's words in addition 
to the htdig list.  Then have htdig Build-Depends on wenglish so at compile 
time you can sort out a list of words that htdig has in addition to the 
wenglish words to reduce the size of the htdig package.

Another option is to file a wishlist bug report against wenglish requesting 
that the extra 42000 works be added.

Having a single comprehensive list of English words for Debian and giving the 
sysadmin an option to edit a small file with their additions to the list is 
the best solution IMHO.

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