gedit wants enchant (Was: Re: GEdit wants enchant)

[Paolo Maggi <paolo maggi polito it>]

Hi guys, 
 
> nowadays (<http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365899#c20>), gedit
> depends on Enchant for its spell checker plugin. This dependency can be
> eliminated by passing --disable-spell to configure, but as spell
> checking is a rather important thing this sounds like a bad idea.

This is right, on popular request we ported the gedit spell checker plugin 
to use enchant (http://www.abisource.com/projects/enchant/) instead of the bare
aspell (http://aspell.net/).

I don't see why do you think this is a problem. The spell checker plugin is 
conditionally compiled at the same way it was conditionally compiled when we 
depended on aspell.

> 
> Maybe this new dependency should be listed on
> <http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointSeventeen/ExternalDependencies>?
>

Note that neither enchant nor aspell are listed on the above wiki page.

But if people agree, I'm all for adding enchant as an official external 
dependency. In this way it will become a sort of official lib for GNOME 
application implementing spell checking functionalities [1].

AFAIK, enchant is distributed by most distro, but I'm not sure it is installed 
by default. For example, IIRC, enchant is not installed by default by Fedora.

Note that some distributions are not compiling the spell checker 
plugin. For example, IIRC, Novell is not compiling it.

Ciao,
Paolo

[1] If people are interested, GeditSpellChecker is a nice GObject-based class
    wrapping the most important enchant features. GeditSpellCheckerDialog is a
    gedit independent spell checker dialog using GeditSpellChecker as backend.


/me is wondering when GNOME people will learn to call gedit "gedit".