[Mageia-dev] Consolidation of the spell checkers - current status before Beta 1 and general version freeze

[Kamil Rytarowski]

Hello!

We are just only one month before the version freeze and two weeks 
before planned release of Beta 1.

What was planned
- to switch in Mageia packages from Aspell and Myspell to Hunspell
- to support in Enchant only Hunspell and Voikko (the Finnish spell-checker)
- permanently remove Myspell from Mga2
- keep Aspell and Aspell dictionaries as a fall-back for old or software 
(or already not ported)
- remove Ispell remnants
* prepare policy for a Hunspell dictionary

What was faced
- lack of policy
- Mozilla software (Firefox, Thunderbird, ...) is using Myspell
- packages: alpine, kadu-module-spellchecker, kdelibs4-core, scribus, 
weechat-aspell, xedit, xfig, gedit, psi, claws-mail, eclipse-texlipse, 
mutt and some perl and php packages were affected
- 120 Hunspell dictionaries needed to be rewritten
- 76 Aspell dictionaries needed to stop providing a virtual package 
"enchant-dictionary"
- Some Myspell packages provide hyphenation and thesaurus - and it has 
to be fully replaced by mythes and hyphen dictionaries

What was done
- policy is written https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Hunspell-dictionary_policy
* it is following Mageia rpm guidelines and spec policies,
* we follow and base on the Fedora packages (mainly versions and 
sources) and therefore it's much easier to maintain
- these packages already switched to Enchant or Hunspell
* alpine, kadu-module-spellchecker, kdelibs4-core,  weechat-aspell, 
xfig, gedit, psi, claws-mail, eclipse-texlipse
(scribus is facing this request upstream, mutt and xedit still need a 
closer look)
* Ispell Perl package was marked as obsoleted and to be deleted
- c. 3/4 Hunspell dictionaries are already transformed
- c. 1/3 Aspell dictionaries are already cleaned

To-do now (or before the local freeze for Beta 1)
- transform the rest of Hunspell dictionaries
- clean Aspell dictionaries
- final cleanning of Mozilla applications
* remove myspell definitely from Mga2
*ETA 2012-02-14*

To-do before the release freeze
- clean mythes, thesaurus (and autocorr) packages
- review transformed dictionaries
- try to switch to Enchant/Hunspell in two Perl modules and review php ones