ConsolidateSpellingLibs
Differences between revisions 10 and 13 (spanning 3 versions)
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| Reduce the number of spelling libraries used in main; modify / extend applications currently not using the "system spellchecker" to use the system spell checker as well. Currently up to four implementations are in use: | Reduce the number of spelling libraries used in main; modify / extend applications currently not using the One True Spellchecker to do so. |
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| * ispell: still used by some applications, it's getting replaced by aspell (no application in main uses it any more). | == Rationale == |
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| * aspell: ispell replacement, biggest users in main are Gnome and KDE | Supporting only one implementation and set of dictionaries eases long-term maintenance. Also, words which the user teaches to the spellcheckers will be consistently available throughout the system. |
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| * myspell: ispell replacement, currently used by thunderbird, mozilla. | == Use cases == |
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| * hunspell: fork/replacement for myspell, dictionaries beeing compatible with myspell, used by openoffice. | * Jane spell-checks a document in Open``Office and adds a few new ones to her personal dictionary. Half an hour later she discusses the document with a colleague in ICQ. Gaim's spell checking automatically knows about the newly added words. |
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| ispell and aspell provide a C interface, myspell and hunspell provide a C++ interface. The enchant library provides a way to abstract from the underlying spell checker (aspell or myspell) and can be used to convert applications to a common interface. | * Hans pays by the byte for his internet connection. When installing Intrepid, it downloads a lot less for language support than Hardy did. He is happy that it installs faster, too. == Scope == This affects all supported packages in Ubuntu which have spell-checking capability. == Design == === Status quo === Currently four implementations are in use in current Intrepid: * ispell: still used by some applications, it's getting replaced by aspell. Not used in Ubuntu main any more, and just 4 reverse dependencies in Universe (spell, sqwebmail, liblingua-ispell-perl, gnumed-client) * aspell: ispell replacement. Biggest users in main are Gnome and KDE. Other reverse dependency in main: ekg, pan, php5-pspell, python-gnome2-extras. About 20 reverse dependencies in universe. * myspell: ispell replacement. Not used by anything in Ubuntu any more. * hunspell: fork/replacement for myspell, dictionaries being compatible with myspell. Currently used by openoffice, Thunderbird, and Firefox. * Finnish currently uses the voikko system, which computes the multitude of possible word permissions from a common stem. Altaic (Turkish and related languages) and Ugric (Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian and relatives) languages with complex prefix and suffix systems generally work badly with above systems. So we will continue to support Voikko for Finnish. Since the supported languages of Voikko and hunspell do not overlap, this does not cause large compatibility problems. ispell and aspell provide a C interface, myspell and hunspell provide a C++ interface. The enchant library provides a way to abstract from the underlying spell checker (aspell or myspell) and can be used to convert applications to a common interface. |
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| == Rationale == | === Goal in Intrepid === |
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| Support only one implementation in the long term. More importantly, only support one source of dictionaries for one spelling library. | hunspell is the most modern implementation and considered the best choice in the free software world. |
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| == Use cases == | * Change GNOME, KDE, and other packages in main to use hunspell. |
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| Jane wonders why some words she writes in Gaim are marked as wrong, although they aren't marked as wrong in OpenOffice. | * Drop ispell/aspell dictionaries from `language-support-*` and from main. |
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| Asdf Qwert worries about the fact that no program knows his name. He is very depressed, because there is no easy way to teach it to all programs. | * Demote ispell to universe. Remove myspell from the archive. |
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| Karl from Germany, who knows that Thunderbird uses ispell, wonders why Thunderbird isn't able to spellcheck his emails using a German dictionary, although he has installed ingerman and iogerman. He also wonders why OpenOffice finds his dictionaries and Thunderbird doesn't. (TB uses an older version of ispell and dictionaries are installed via xpis.) {{{ tfheen: please provide use cases which show how things are supposed to work, not how they are currently broken }}} == Scope == == Design == |
* Drop myspell dictionaries from `language-support-*` where a hunspell dictionary is available. Keep the myspell one for other languages. |
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| The system spellchecker used in both Gnome and KDE is aspell. Two applications are not yet using aspell: | === GNOME === |
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| === Firefox === | * Fedora has patches to support hunspell through enchant now; The http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary spec has pointers to bugzilla. |
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| * First step: use hunspell instead of myspell with the goal to demote myspell from main. myspell and hunspell are supposed to be API compatible. | * [https://launchpad.net/~phanatic/+archive Szilveszter Farkas's PPA] has test packages with those patches applied. |
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| * Convert to use enchant. | === KDE === |
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| === OpenOffice.org === OOo makes use of hunspell-based dictionaries and hyphenation patterns. Hypenation patterns are not (?) supported by aspell, so it may prove difficult to completely replace the use of hunspell by aspell. In a first step, write a plugin to additionally read/write the aspell system and user dictionaries in addition to using the aspell dictionaries. |
KDE4 upstream already uses enchant/hunspell. Above Fedora specification has patches for KDE 3, but since Intrepid will only ship KDE 4.1, we do not need to do anything in particular for KDE for this specification. |
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| == BoF agenda and discussion == Additional requests from the 2005 spec: * It would be universally cool if we could somehow tie in Rosetta, language packs and this unified spellchecking library. This way translators and users would be using the same de-facto list, and translators could on the fly correct the list if there happened to be a problem. This would definitely make my life as a translator a tad easier. * It should be easy to switch between languages for spell checking. People have a local language set but often need to use other languages to engage on-line (like I'm doing here). (I'm thinking of programs like Xchat/gaim/firefox that only check the local system language.) Spell checking should be enabled throughout the system for all languages selected in "language support". There should be a standard way to switch between languages in applications, but perhaps it is even possible to detect what language is being used in a particular field. - finalbeta ---- CategorySpec |
The demotion of aspell has not been discussed. It would require porting php and ekg to hunspell, which hasn't happened upstream yet. Thus we will keep the aspell library itself in main for the time being. |
Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/consolidate-spell-checkers
Packages affected: hunspell, myspell, aspell, ispell and depending packages
Summary
Reduce the number of spelling libraries used in main; modify / extend applications currently not using the One True Spellchecker to do so.
Rationale
Supporting only one implementation and set of dictionaries eases long-term maintenance. Also, words which the user teaches to the spellcheckers will be consistently available throughout the system.
Use cases
Jane spell-checks a document in OpenOffice and adds a few new ones to her personal dictionary. Half an hour later she discusses the document with a colleague in ICQ. Gaim's spell checking automatically knows about the newly added words.
- Hans pays by the byte for his internet connection. When installing Intrepid, it downloads a lot less for language support than Hardy did. He is happy that it installs faster, too.
Scope
This affects all supported packages in Ubuntu which have spell-checking capability.
Design
Status quo
Currently four implementations are in use in current Intrepid:
- ispell: still used by some applications, it's getting replaced by aspell. Not used in Ubuntu main any more, and just 4 reverse dependencies in Universe (spell, sqwebmail, liblingua-ispell-perl, gnumed-client)
- aspell: ispell replacement. Biggest users in main are Gnome and KDE. Other reverse dependency in main: ekg, pan, php5-pspell, python-gnome2-extras. About 20 reverse dependencies in universe.
- myspell: ispell replacement. Not used by anything in Ubuntu any more.
- hunspell: fork/replacement for myspell, dictionaries being compatible with myspell. Currently used by openoffice, Thunderbird, and Firefox.
- Finnish currently uses the voikko system, which computes the multitude of possible word permissions from a common stem. Altaic (Turkish and related languages) and Ugric (Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian and relatives) languages with complex prefix and suffix systems generally work badly with above systems. So we will continue to support Voikko for Finnish. Since the supported languages of Voikko and hunspell do not overlap, this does not cause large compatibility problems.
ispell and aspell provide a C interface, myspell and hunspell provide a C++ interface. The enchant library provides a way to abstract from the underlying spell checker (aspell or myspell) and can be used to convert applications to a common interface.
Dictionary support is splitted out in its own spec ConsolidateDictionaries.
Goal in Intrepid
hunspell is the most modern implementation and considered the best choice in the free software world.
- Change GNOME, KDE, and other packages in main to use hunspell.
Drop ispell/aspell dictionaries from language-support-* and from main.
- Demote ispell to universe. Remove myspell from the archive.
Drop myspell dictionaries from language-support-* where a hunspell dictionary is available. Keep the myspell one for other languages.
Implementation
GNOME
- Fedora has patches to support hunspell through enchant now;
The http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary spec has pointers to bugzilla.
[https://launchpad.net/~phanatic/+archive Szilveszter Farkas's PPA] has test packages with those patches applied.
KDE
KDE4 upstream already uses enchant/hunspell. Above Fedora specification has patches for KDE 3, but since Intrepid will only ship KDE 4.1, we do not need to do anything in particular for KDE for this specification.
Outstanding issues
The demotion of aspell has not been discussed. It would require porting php and ekg to hunspell, which hasn't happened upstream yet. Thus we will keep the aspell library itself in main for the time being.
ConsolidateSpellingLibs (last edited 2008-08-06 16:16:08 by localhost)