Re: (Not) available aspell dictionaries

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 02:44:07AM +0100, Christoph Berg wrote:
> I had a look at the list of available aspell dictionaries at [1] and
> compared it with the Debian packages that are available. The
> comparision is a OO.o table (attached as .sxc and .pdf, .html version
> available at [2]).
> 
> 28 dictionaries are packaged [3]
> 39 dictionaries are not packaged
> 
> I'm interested in getting these 39 aspell dictionaries into Debian.
> The problem is that I don't speak any of them [4], but I should be
> able to ask some friends for linguistic support for at least the
> slavian and romanian languages missing.

There are a few things keeping all of those languages from being
supported:

* Aspell 0.60 in Debian.  0.60 adds support for a lot more languages
  than were supported by 0.50 and earlier versions.

* The arch-dependent nature of the dictionaries.  Many compiled
  dictionaries are huge (> 20 MB) and currently all dictionary packages
  are arch-dependent.  If the average dictionary package is 10MB, 10 MB
  * 12 arches * 39 dictionaries = 4680MB.  That's a very big hit on the
  mirrors for something that is avoidable.  We need to make dictionary
  packages Arch: all.

* Lack of packaging coordination.  I've been planning to improve the
  coordination of dictionary packaging.  Ideally, I'd like to be a
  co-maintainer of all dictionary packages (since often I'm concerned
  with packaging) but have at least one native speaker be a
  co-maintainer of each package as well (since I'm monolingual and can't
  easily test the packages or handle bug reports).

The first will be resolved soon, the second I hope to have resolved soon
(but post-sarge), and the third will follow after the first two
hopefully.

> What I'm asking now is
> * does it make sense to mass-ITP so many dictionaries?
>   (someone created the dictionaries, so there must be interest in them)
> * does it make sense to package languages I don't speak, but where I
>   know someone that does? (probably yes)
> * does it make sense to package languages I don't speak, and where I
>   don't know someone that does? (questionable)
> * does it make sense to package languages where I don't even know the
>   charset/script? (even more questionable)
> 
> One thing I thought of was filing RFAs (and additionally ask for
> Co-Maintainers) on the packages right from the start, so that someone
> interested in the dictionary could take it over easily. That way the
> dictionaries would always be in the best hands they could be.

I would hold off on all of these until the above issues are resolved.

-- 
Society is never going to make any progress until we all learn to
pretend to like each other.