hunspell-en and OOo

[Caolan McNamara]

On Sat, 2006-12-16 at 10:19 +0000, Paul wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> hunspell is in rawhide. I can see that. OOo requires hunspell-en though.
> Is this just a mistake on packaging hunspell or is it a problem with OOo
> and more over, when is a fix going to appear in rawhide for it?

Should all be good today, I jumped the gun on requiring hunspell-en
before it was actually available.

hunspell is the package which provides the spell checking library used
by OOo and the hunspell command line tool

hunspell-en is the package which provides the english dictionaries which
the OOo core requires, just as the core bundles the english resources as
the effective "C" final fallback locale.

All the noise is to kick off the master plan to reduce our dictionary
madness a bit for fc7 (rhbz#207571) or at least to enable this.

So hunspell has been moved out of OOo (rhbz#214764) and now the english
dictionaries have been moved out as well (rhbz#218769). Which will
enable firefox/thunderbird to reuse the same dictionaries if tweaked to
use hunspell instead of myspell and the firefox/thunderbird dictionary
dir is linked to /usr/share/myspell (rhbz#218762). Current
firefox/thunderbird use myspell, hunspell's predecessor and also include
copies of these english dictionaries, so that's a relatively small step.

Also vim has a rather baroque spellchecker which backs on to converted
copies of these same hunspell/myspell dictionaries. rhbz#219777 is a
semi-plausible route to avoiding the need for the converted copies
(which would come to approx 40megs in total I think)

So http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/hunspell/ are the src.rpms for the
rest of the dictionaries that are currently included as part of our OOo
langpacks. I'll take care of those myself (I guess)

I'd encourage anyone who wants to package dictionaries for other
languages for OOo (et.al) that are not listed at the above url, or
especially for anyone who might already have packaged in extras stuff
like "openoffice.org-dict.some_language" to repackage their dictionaries
along the lines of the like the above examples. i.e. take the dicts from
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries set the correct
licence for the dict, and take the datestamp of the language there as
the pre-release version unless the dictionary otherwise notes a
canonical version.

Unlike the previous situation there's no need for the baroque "DICT name
foo whatever" line to be added to dictionary.lst, just name the
dictionary as the xx_YY language_region it supplies and it'll just work
out of the box in OOo.

C.