Packaging Firefox extensions (Finnish spell checking)

Christopher Aillon caillon at redhat.com
Sat May 24 17:00:28 UTC 2008


On 05/24/2008 12:04 PM, Ville-Pekka Vainio wrote:
> 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>.

Actually, that page says the malaga backend is worse than hunspell, 
lacking important items such as threadsafety and does not perform well 
in comparison.  We already have a backend which we deem to be the right 
backend and it would be great if work could be moved there to help get 
hunspell in order.

> 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. 

Right, this is the only reason that I can tell for using malaga. 
Someone did the work for malaga, but not for hunspell.

> 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.

Don't confuse the dictionary with the backend.  So far I haven't seen a 
reason why the hunspell backend couldn't support Finnish as well as 
malaga if people would simply work on a dictionary for that backend 
instead. I think it is important to note our strong desire for making it 
work with hunspell.  We went through great lengths to make hunspell THE 
dictionary.  See 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary which this 
would now regress.




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