Re: Bug#1020387: dictionaries-common: Consensus regarding the packaging of the Qt WebEngine hunspell binary dictionaries

[Roland Rosenfeld <roland@debian.org>]

Hi,

let me try to summarize where we stand and what options and open
questions we have.

I see the following options to package the bdic-Files (seems not all
of them were already mentioned before):

a) Bundle the bdic files in the existing hunspell-<lang> files.
   - Pro: no new packages needed
   - Con: Duplicate size of existing ~80 packages
b) Create new packages hunspell-bdic-<lang>.
   - Pro: User can install what is needed
   - Con: ~80 new packages necessary
c) Add a mechanism to dictionaries-common, which extends
   update-dictcommon-hunspell to build the bdic file in
   hunspell-<lang>.postinst.
   - Pro: No changes in hunspell-<lang>
   - Pro: No redundancy in Archive
   - Con: Wastes space on users disk, unless QtWebEngine is used
   - Con: May slow down hunspell-<lang> installation
   - Con: Pulls in qtwebengine5-dev-tools for all hunspell-<lang> packages
d) Add a new package (hunspell-bdic-generator or the like), that
   builds bdic files for all hunspell-<lang> packages if it is
   installed.  This requires some dpkg/apt-hook to trigger building
   bdic if a new hunspell-<lang> package is installed or upgraded.
   All packages using bdic files have to depend on
   hunspell-bdic-generator.
   - Pro: No changes in hunspell-<lang>
   - Pro: No redundancy in Archive
   - Pro: Only used/installed when needed
   - Con: Complex hook mechanism

I'm not sure what option I prefer myself, they all have
disadvantages, but I personally prefer b) over a), while c) and d)
could reduce the effort for hunspell-<lang> maintainers (in trade-off
to the efforts in dictionaries-common).


Except this I see the following open points:
- Is bdic really arch:all or do we have some endiane issue?  For option
  c) and d) this is irrelevant.
- Where should the bdic files be placed?
  1) /usr/share/hunspell-bdic
  2) /usr/share/qtwebengine-dict
  3) /usr/share/bdic
  4) /usr/share/hunspell
  5) something else
  (The order mentions my personal preference)
- Is there some commandline client for auto-testing the bdic files?
- How to reuse the bdic files with chromium?
- 3 bugs in qwebengine_convert_dict reported by Soren Stoutner
- Do we target this this to bookworm or trixie?

Greetings
Roland