[Dict-common-dev] myspell/hunspell relationships need update

Agustin Martin agmartin at debian.org
Mon Sep 26 10:29:37 UTC 2016


On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 08:14:43AM +0200, Roland Rosenfeld wrote:
> Hi Agustin!

Hi, Roland!

> On Mon, 19 Sep 2016, Agustin Martin wrote:
> 
> > > We should remove openoffice.org completely here and we should replace
> > > iceweasel by firefox.
> > 
> > Agreed, 
> 
> But don't forget firefox-esr as an alternative...

Thanks for reminding. Need to actually prepare that line.

> > > But my more important question is: shouldn't we remove this complete
> > > bullet point?
> > > Why do we suggest some randomly chosen programs, that use hunspell/myspell?
> > > Even hunspell itself (the command line version, in contrast to
> > > libhunspell-1.4) doesn't make much sense as a "Suggests", since it is
> > > seldom used, while most users use the library via Firefox, LibreOffice
> > > or some other programs.
> > 
> > At least Emacs uses a pipe to plain hunspell. The point here is that
> > installing a hunspell dictionary should suggest that it needs to be
> > installed along with something that uses it, so I do not think that the
> > suggests is bogus. Other thing is what are the contents of the suggests
> > line,
> 
> Wouldn't that imply, that every lib* should suggest a program that's
> linked against it?
> The correct "direction" of dependencies is, that hunspell or
> libhunspell-* recommends hunspell-directory, which is provided by the
> directory itself, but not vice versa.

I do not think they are the same. Usually libraries are not directly
installed, but pulled by the program needing them. However, for
dictionaries, a naive user would first think about the dictionary itself
rather than about the spellchecking engine it uses. Althought usually not
needed (users installing a dictionary will usually have instaled first
something that can be used with the dict), that suggests line reminds
the user that the dictionary should have something capable of using it
if not already installed. I think this was the original rationale behind the
suggests line. Rene may remember more details.

Regards,

-- 
Agustin



More information about the Dict-common-dev mailing list