Hi,
We now have the Enchant Voikko provider in Fedora (package enchant-voikko), which provides Finnish spell checking support in Enchant. I would like to add it in comps for F10 and F9, but it's (clearly) not a GUI app and enchant itself is not in comps at all. This is what I'd like to add under the "Finnish support" group:
<packagereq type="conditional" requires="enchant">enchant-voikko</packagereq>
Would that be ok? I see pretty much the same has been done for hunspell packages for different languages, but hunspell is in the Base group, enchant is not. What should I do?
I also have a package called tmispell-voikko, which can be used as an ispell replacement for Finnish and it also has an ncurses "GUI". Technically it's a text mode app, but could I still add it? It would go under the "Finnish Support" group as well:
<packagereq type="optional">tmispell-voikko</packagereq>
On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Ville-Pekka Vainio < vpivaini@cs.helsinki.fi> wrote:
Hi,
We now have the Enchant Voikko provider in Fedora (package enchant-voikko), which provides Finnish spell checking support in Enchant. I would like to add it in comps for F10 and F9, but it's (clearly) not a GUI app and enchant itself is not in comps at all. This is what I'd like to add under the "Finnish support" group:
<packagereq type="conditional" requires="enchant">enchant-voikko</packagereq>
Would that be ok? I see pretty much the same has been done for hunspell packages for different languages, but hunspell is in the Base group, enchant is not. What should I do?
I also have a package called tmispell-voikko, which can be used as an ispell replacement for Finnish and it also has an ncurses "GUI". Technically it's a text mode app, but could I still add it? It would go under the "Finnish Support" group as well:
<packagereq type="optional">tmispell-voikko</packagereq>
<still not happy that this isn't within hunspell>
Since these packages all seem extremely specific to Finnish, I don't necessarily see a problem with just listing them in Finnish-support, without any conditionals.
-- Jes
Jesse Keating wrote:
<still not happy that this isn't within hunspell>
Since these packages all seem extremely specific to Finnish, I don't necessarily see a problem with just listing them in Finnish-support, without any conditionals.
Here's what I've done now: I've added enchant-voikko as default for F10 and as optional for F9 (because I wasn't sure if you can/should add any "default" stuff after the release). I've also added tmispell-voikko as optional for F8-F10.
I noticed F8 comps doesn't have openoffice.org-voikko yet, but I wasn't sure if I can add '<packagereq type="conditional" requires="openoffice.org-core">openoffice.org-voikko</packagereq>' to a stable release and if adding it as optional would work at all, as it really needs openoffice.
About hunspell: The main Voikko maintainer has added some discussion points about not using hunspell to http://voikko.sourceforge.net/architecture.html. From what I have understood from mailing list discussions, switching to hunspell would in practice mean worse spell checking results, losing hyphenation support and not having the possibility of implementing a grammar checker in the near future.
Jesse Keating wrote:
<still not happy that this isn't within hunspell>
I'd like to add that the nature of languages is such that there is no way to have "one spellchecking backend for them all", if the backend makes any assumptions of the languages. What Fedora has actually done, implementing enchant support from existing patches etc. is just what should be done too, as Enchant is an abstraction library that does not make too much assumptions.
The only exceptions to Enchant usage are openoffice.org and mozilla products, which is why currently separate Voikko extensions will be provided for them. Regarding Mozilla for example, they just finished switching to hunspell instead of enchant, possibly also believing that it would solve spell-checking problems because hunspell's developers have relatively actively touted its features.
Hunspell _is_ a very good thing for eg. Indo-European languages, bringing ispell/aspell/myspell hopefully to an end, but it cannot be expected to be flexible enough for all languages. The updated Voikko architecture page linked in Ville-Pekka's post explains a few problems, possibly the other Enchant users like Zemberek (Turkish) or hspell (Hebrew) would have more insight too.
-Timo
Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyrinki <at> gmail.com> writes:
The only exceptions to Enchant usage are openoffice.org and mozilla products, which is why currently separate Voikko extensions will be provided for them.
There's also the original KSpell interface in KDE 3 and the compatibility K3Spell class in KDE 4. Those expect an ispell-compatible command-line interface. It is possible to use tmispell for this purpose, and in fact I have a patch for that already, though not applied yet, but each new spellchecker has to be added separately (which I already did for hunspell). (Unfortunately, enchant's command line is not usable for this purpose at all.) Changing the code to use Enchant as a library instead of running command-line spellcheckers would be a significant effort for that legacy code, so it is unlikely to happen.
The future of spellchecking in KDE is of course Sonnet (which was called KSpell2 in KDE 3), which already uses Enchant, but it will take time until all the applications are ported, if it ever completely happens.
Kevin Kofler