FeatureDictionary patches for KDE

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Sat Dec 22 09:32:23 UTC 2007


I'm working on implementing:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary
in our KDE packages. This is the current situation:

* KDE 4 uses an API called Sonnet for spellchecking. Sonnet already has an 
enchant backend, and it is the default recommended by upstream. There's also an 
aspell backend; we will probably drop the aspell-devel BR so we lose the hard 
aspell dependency, aspell can be used through enchant anyway (using 
enchant-aspell, which is about to be split into a separate subpackage according 
to FeatureDictionary).

* The situation in KDE 3 is more complex. We'll be stuck with several KDE 3 
apps for a while to come, so I had to find a solution there too. As KDE 3 has 
seen years of binary compatibility, there are 2 spellchecking implementations 
in kdelibs3:

- legacy KSpell: That API uses command-line spellcheckers using the "ispell 
pipe interface". It doesn't use plugins, instead, everything is handled by 2 
central classes. Rewriting this code to use libraries (e.g. enchant) properly 
is a lot of effort for this legacy code. Thus, I patched it to support the 
hunspell command line and its "ispell pipe interface" (which required only 
minor changes):
http://repo.calcforge.org/f9/kdelibs-3.5.8-kspell-hunspell.diff
The patch is preliminary, I still have to test that it works, and we also have 
to make sure the defaults are set up so hunspell is used by default, at least 
for new installations.

- KSpell2: This is the API KDE 4's Sonnet is derived from. It uses 
spellchecking libraries and a plugin architecture. I backported Sonnet's 
enchant backend plugin from kdelibs 4 SVN to KSpell2:
http://repo.calcforge.org/f9/kdelibs-3.5.8-kspell2-enchant.diff
I did a minimum amount of testing on this one, it could probably use more. And 
here too, we'll want to make sure it is the default, most likely by not 
shipping any other KSpell2 backend.

This comes "fresh out of the presses". I haven't added these patches to the 
Rawhide packages or submitted them upstream yet.

        Kevin Kofler




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