Bug#929923: missing dictionaries.xcu confuses non-US English locales (e.g. en_AU)
Package: mythes-en-us
Version: 1:5.2.5-1
Severity: normal
Hi Rene et al.
My users are in en_AU.UTF-8 locale.
They reported that Tools > Thesaurus doesn't work with mythes-en-us installed.
Debian has a mythes-en-au, but it's a REALLY old one (2011) that predates LibreOffice.
Upstream, LibreOffice uses a dictionaries.xcu file to say "use the en_US thesaurus for ALL en locales".
AFAICT Debian doesn't ship dictionaries.xcu files, though they are present in the libreoffice-dictionaries source package.
I confirmed experimentally that simple symlinks are enough to fix
Tools > Thesaurus for my users (on Debian 9 with LO from
stretch-backports):
root@bentham-wing-0c:~# ln -s /usr/share/mythes/th_en_US_v2.dat /usr/share/mythes/th_en_AU_v2.dat
root@bentham-wing-0c:~# ln -s /usr/share/mythes/th_en_US_v2.idx /usr/share/mythes/th_en_AU_v2.idx
How do you feel about doing something like this in the Debian package?
(I think the Right Thing from LibreOffice's point of view would be to
include the dictionaries.xcu files in the binary .debs, but that
sounds a lot more invasive and complicated. For a start,
dictionaries.xcu expects a locale's dictionary and thesaurus to be
shipped together, where Debian packages them separately.)
See also: https://extensions.libreoffice.org/extensions/english-dictionaries,
which I think is just the en/ subdirectory of libreoffice-dictionaries from
https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/6.3.0/
Example XML snippet from a dictionaries.xcu:
<node oor:name="ThesDic_en-US" oor:op="fuse">
<prop oor:name="Locations" oor:type="oor:string-list">
<value>%origin%/th_en_US_v2.dat</value>
</prop>
<prop oor:name="Format" oor:type="xs:string">
<value>DICT_THES</value>
</prop>
<prop oor:name="Locales" oor:type="oor:string-list">
<value>en-GB en-US en-ZA en-AU en-CA</value>
</prop>
</node>
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