Re: Hallelujah! Hspell 1.0 is released.

On Wed, May 17, 2006, Diego Iastrubni wrote about "Re: Hallelujah! Hspell 1.0 is released.":
> c application), "hspell-i" (a simple bash script which calls hspell.real -i), 
> and multispell. Users can change the application been used for "hspell" using 
> a simple command line. Here is a small example:
> 
> linux:~ # ls -l /usr/bin/hspell
> lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 24 2006-05-16 23:21 /usr/bin/hspell 
> -> /etc/alternatives/hspell
> linux:~ # ls -l /etc/alternatives/hspell
> lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 17 2006-05-17 00:42 /etc/alternatives/hspell 
> -> /usr/bin/hspell-i
> linux:~ # update-alternatives --display hspell
> hspell - status is manual.
>  link currently points to /usr/bin/hspell-i
...

From your description, it appears that this "alternatives" mechanism (which
like Dan, I wasn't even aware of), is perhaps well-suited for system software
(e.g., choosing between Sendmail and Postfix, or between MySQL and Postgresql)
but I don't see how it is relevant for user-level software, like which
spell-checker to use. If changing the spell-checker to use requires modifying
links, how can multiple users use this system concurrently?

My guess is that there *has* to be a better way. For example, in Emacs, the
spell-checking command, which defaults to "ispell", can be changed to anything
by changing a variable, and you can change it to "hspell", "hspell-i" or
"multispell" as you wish. Is this impossible to do in KDE?

The "alternatives" system you mention could become useful (in my opinion) if
instead of linking to one of the alternatives, the program could link to a
script which chooses one of the alternatives based on run-time criteria,
such as an environment variable. If "alternatives" don't provide that feature,
it's not too hard to write a script that does provide it (multispell itself
comes close).

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