Bug#988466: RFS: aspell-sl/0.60-5 -- Slovenian dictionary for GNU Aspell

[Tomaž Šolc <tomaz.solc@tablix.org>]

Dear Paul,

On 15. 05. 21 03:53, Paul Wise wrote:
> The Homepage is 404, but the site it was on still works. Have you
> tried contacting the person (Tomaž Erjavec) listed at the bottom of
> the page (there is an email)?

I contacted Tomaž Erjavec and Aleš Košir (one of the authors of
aspell-sl). aspell-sl is currently unmaintained. The old website and the
archive of releases were lost in a hard drive crash.

> I noticed an older version of this on the GNU website. It might be
> worth contacting the aspell/ispell communities about this too.

Tomaž and Aleš also pointed out that an old release of aspell-sl is
still distributed as an official Slovenian dictionary for aspell from
the gnu.org website.

I checked the gnu.org release (0.50-0). It appears newer than 0.60 on
which the current Debian package is currently based, despite its version
number. It has a later copyright date (2004 vs. 2002) and the dictionary
has approx. 17000 new words added and no words were removed.

> I noticed that LibreOffice includes support for Slovenian and have
> their own dictionary. It might be worth contacting the Slovenian
> LibreOffice community.

Earlier I missed the fact that hunspell-sl from Libreoffice is also
packaged for Debian now. It is indeed another package that provides a
Slovenian spell checker.


For now I think it makes sense to base the aspell-sl Debian package on
the 0.50-0 release from gnu.org instead of the 0.60 from the old
website. I see on repology.org that other distros that don't pull
aspell-sl package from Debian do that as well.

In the long term, it would be nice if aspell-sl would get a new upstream
maintainer. I will send out a few more mails, but I suspect finding one
will not be easy.

I've updated my proposed package: I changed the version to
0.60+really0.50.0-1, updated the copyright file, added a watch file that
checks the gnu.org index and did a few other minor packaging changes.

Full changelog entry:

  * Base the package on 0.50-0 tarball from gnu.org.
    - old upstream webpage is inaccessible since 2009.
    - despite lower version number the wordlist in 0.50-0
      is larger and has a newer copyright date.
  * Minor packaging update
    - d/control: update to SV 4.5.1, update Vcs URLs, add
      Rules-Requires-Root, B/D on debhelper-compat = 12,
      add Homepage field.
    - Add d/watch.
    - d/copyright: use https in URLs, update to match new
      upstream package.
    - d/changelog: remove trailing whitespace.

You can fetch the new package using:

dget -x
https://www.tablix.org/~avian/aspell-sl/aspell-sl_0.60+really0.50.0-1.dsc

Best regards
Tomaž