freeze exception: src:rus-ispell
Greetings,
The following package needs both sponsoring and a freeze exception:
http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/r/rus-ispell/rus-ispell_0.99g5-7.dsc
To put the bug in context, some recent changes in the way some
building tools work under encodings other than the C locale have
resulted in a partially broken build. The result are 3 Russian
dictionaries (ispell/aspell/myspell) that are mostly useless for
everyday usage.
To give you a sense of scale of the problem, this is the same as if
English dictionaries were produced from a source package called
eng-ispell, from which American and British spelling variants would be
generated using some build script magic. Now, imagine a situation
where, because of some changes in basic binary tools (tr, grep, uniq),
the build targets would produce dictionaries that only included the
British spelling, in a situation where the American spelling is
obviously the most widespread worldwide.
This is precisely the situation that currently plagues the Russian
dictionaries. There is essentially two spelling variants for many
Russian words, one with a specific vowel accented (traditional
spelling, mostly used by academicians, these days) and a contemporary
form with that same vowel unaccented. During the last few months,
debian/rules scripts that had worked just fine as-is for ages suddenly
started producing dictionaries that only included the traditional
variant, in a context where the modern variant is obviously more
useful in contemporary usage. This issue had gone mostly unnoticed for
several months, since I myself prefer to use the traditional spelling.
It took the work of several contributors to find a clean way of fixing
this and we just barely got around finding a method that produces
usable dictionaries in a repeatable way, which is how this request
came so close to the Lenny release.
Martin-Éric
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