At 05:35 PM 3/16/01 -0500, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>I have a RFP that's really simple to implement for whomever wants it:
>
>We need to abandon "american.hash" - we need something more robust. What I 
>think we want is en_US.hash, de_DE.hash, etc... If we do this, we can 
>dynamically load dictionaries based on our current locale or even with the 
>"lang" attribute like my hack last night.

Definitely.  Vlad has a nice workaround with the locale-specific 
system.profile trick, but this would be a lot cleaner over the long run.  

  http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/March/0416.html

Note that if people want to keep using their pre-installed dictionaries that 
shipped with their Linux distro, they can probably just keep using the 
existing mechanisms, or set up the appropriate symlink.  In fact, this 
sounds like the kind of thing that a clever install script could 
automatically do. 

One nit-pick, though.  Can we please, please use 

  - dashes (en-US, du-DE) instead of 
  - underscores (en_US, du_DE)

both here and in the file format?  I know that the Unix/C locale mechanism 
likes underscores, but everywhere else (internet protocols, HTML, XML, etc) 
people use dashes.  

>So I guess my suggested plan of action is this:
>1) Rename the dictionaries (and start housing (*not necessarily shipping*) 
>some known working ones on the website)

Do we want the same verification process as we use for binaries, or do we 
just post any submissions as is?  Also, if people are going to build new 
dictionaries, I'd hope that they'd be kind enough to include a few proper 
nouns in there while they're at it (like AbiWord and Abi).  ;-)

>2) And Either:
>a) Change ispell's SpellCheckInit() function to take a string of the form 
>'en_US' and have *it* create the proper .hash name so we can share 100% code 
>with Pspell
>b) Keep passing the full path to the dictionary, and have that 1 ifdef in 
>our code for ispell/pspell

This is probably an installer issue, so you might want to check with our 
downstream packagers.  The current mechanism allows dictionaries to be 
located anywhere (I think) in case distros want to point to a set of 
dictionaries they've installed elsehere.  

>Whaddya think?

You've got my vote.  :-)

Paul

Reply via email to