Packaging Firefox extensions (Finnish spell checking)

[Ville-Pekka Vainio]

Christopher Aillon wrote:
> Is there a reason the dictionary can't be integrated into hunspell?  I
> don't want to get to the point where we have an extension for every
> language spellcheck.  Hunspell exists to make this easier, and I'd
> rather see this happen there...

The Voikko project initially started as the hunspell-fi project, but hunspell 
was dropped for now, because using malaga 
<http://home.arcor.de/bjoern-beutel/malaga/> gives better results with the 
Finnish language. If you're interested, please read 
<http://voikko.sourceforge.net/architecture.html>. One big decision maker was 
also the fact that someone called Hannu Väisänen maintains a big Finnish 
vocabulary known upstream as suomi-malaga, in Fedora packaged as 
malaga-suomi-voikko. This, as the name suggests, requires using malaga. 

Voikko gives excellent results with the Finnish language currently, much 
better than any other free software implementations (myspell/ispell/aspell 
and hunspell, whose upstreams are practically non-existent currently). In my 
opinion Voikko is now working at least as well as the only proprietary 
Finnish spell checker for Linux I know, Soikko. So it's pretty much the best 
you can get.

There are less than 10 people working on Voikko right now, probably more like 
5 and they're doing a great job. You do have a valid point, but I really 
don't see the architechture changing to hunspell or any other in the near 
future.

Remember we don't need to have the Voikko stuff in every Fedora installation, 
for example the openoffice.org-voikko package is currently only installed if 
the user installs OO.o and the Finnish language support group.


-- 
Ville-Pekka Vainio