[Evolution-hackers] Future of Evolution Spellchecking?



hey,

after spending more than an hour without any success on helping a guy on
irc to get croatian spellchecking in evolution to work, i was pretty
confused as none of the tips and tricks worked.
the next day he told me the reason: gnome-spell's hardcoded list of
KNOWN_LANGUAGES[1] is missing croatian. it's also missing bulgarian [2].
it's also missing all south-african languages [3], indonesian, several
indian languages and many, many other languages spoken by hundreds of
millions of people (i am not exaggerating here).

that list of KNOWN_LANGUAGES currently includes 42 languages, but aspell
supports 85 languages[4]. so i went ahead, wrote a patch[5] to support
all available aspell dictionaries and added it to bug 62271[3].

but, as dwayne (the original reporter of bug 62271) mentioned correctly
in gnome's bugzilla[6], my patch is not a solution, but only a
workaround - everytime new aspell dictionaries are available,
gnome-spell must be patched. that sucks.

i could rewrite my patch to support all languages covered by ISO 639-1
so gnome-spell does not have to be patched each time, but since this is
a lot of work i would like to see this discussed first.

so would that patch be accepted? any comments or thoughts on this? and
by whom would it be accepted, because who maintains gnome-spell anymore?
i know that radek was the last person working on gnome-spell (and harish
as evolution maintainer told me to mail him directly), but i have not
received an answer yet (it has been three days), and the string
announcement period is getting closer (yes, the names of the languages
have to be translated).

so can someone assure me that there will be a gnome-spell release for
2.14 including this patch if i would provide it?
otherwise it's just worthless and people keep waiting for spellchecking
support for their language.

keep in mind that it's ridiculous to have the entire gnome-desktop
translated to xhosa, but not being able to have xhosa spellchecking in
gnome-desktop's mailer[7], to name one example.
keep in mind that we are excluding many, many potential customers out
there (...this one goes out to novell ;-).

in a long run (gnome 2.16?), gnome-spell should switch to use enchant
instead of aspell. enchant is capable of having multiple backends loaded
at once (see "backends" section at [8]), including aspell.
but would anyone work on that port?


calling for comments,
andre


[1] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-spell/gnome-spell/dictionary.c?view=markup
[2] http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=62632
[3] http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=62271
[4] http://aspell.sourceforge.net/man-html/Supported.html
[5] http://bugzilla.ximian.com/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=16200
[6] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148586
[7] i know that a xhosa aspell dictionary is not available yet, but
there's been work on it, see comments at [6].
[8] http://www.abisource.com/projects/enchant/

-- 
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 http://www.iomc.de

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