Kurt, On Wednesday, July 16, 2025 11:19:53 PM Mountain Standard Time Kurt Roeckx wrote: > On July 17, 2025 12:51:00 AM GMT+02:00, Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> wrote: > >Because I do realize that this is a non-trivial change to LibreOffice, I am > >shipping nl_NL.dic for now, which all Dutch speakers can use for spell > >checking. > > I disagree. I think not shipping nl_BE is an RC bug. If you don't fix it, I > will upload it myself.
First, I should note that the above email I am replying to was sent by Kurt to the bug email address, as well as to myself directly. It does not currently appear on the bug interface, although I read on debian-private today that the BTS was experiencing some load issues related to scraping that either delayed or deleted some emails. I am quoting the text above because Kurt obviously intended it to be included in bug history. Based on this discussion on this thread, it has become apparent that this is a problem with both LibreOffice and Thunderbird. This provides an interesting scenario, as these two programs are probably the primary consumers of the Hunspell dictionaries on Debian. So, their behavior results in a de-facto standard for how things are done. I feel that the current behavior is incorrect and should be considered a bug. Other people either seem to feel that the behavior is correct or that, even if it is a bug, it is not important enough to be changed. Given the ramifications for users, I feel it is important that the Hunspell packages shipped in Debian work with LibreOffice and Thunderbird, even if the behavior of those packages is not in conformance with any actual standard or how language codes are treated in general by other programs. If LibreOffice and Thunderbird were interested in working towards a correct use of the language codes, I would be willing to maintain the previous behavior, including shipping as many inaccurate country symlinks as necessary, until the changes could be implemented. But, personally, I do not want to have my name associated with a package that intends to ship these inaccurate symlinks in perpetuity. As such, I think the best way forward is probably for Kurt to upload the changes he proposes. When doing so, please remove my name from the Maintainer field. It should be noted that the Dutch package has some significant issues that I intended to address when I salvaged it, but were not appropriate to address before the freeze. These changes exist in experimental for dutch and in the new hunspell-nl source package in the NEW queue. Because they are significant, I intended to discuss them via email before they entered unstable. The email, which I had previously written and intended to send out after the trixie release, is attached. As the new maintainer of the package, you can decide how you want to deal with these issues and if you want to use the work on these two packages currently in experimental or if you would like to go a different direction. The other thing that should be noted is that there are at least three other Hunspell packages affected by this same issue: hunspell-ar hunspell-bo hunspell-dz There is already an existing bug report discussing hunspell-ar that is worth reviewing: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1109305 The other two dictionaries also have bugs, already closed, but those do not contain any important information not already discussed here. In all those cases, please feel free to upload whatever changes you feel are appropriate as long as you remove me as the Maintainer. -- Soren Stoutner [email protected]
To: [email protected], Debian Install System Team <[email protected]>, nicoo <[email protected]> CC: Manuel Guerra <[email protected]> Subject: Intention to drop aspell-nl and idutch binary packages TL;DR ----- There is no DFSG-free source available to produce the aspell-nl and idutch binary packages. Unless a DFSG-free source can be identified, they will be removed from Debian. Background ---------- Recently, Manuel Guerra and I salvaged the dutch source package, which produces the hunspell-nl, wdutch, aspell-nl, and idutch binary packages. Our primary motivation was to update hunspell-nl to ship a .bdic binary dictionary compatible with Qt WebEngine used by various browsers in Debian including Privacy Browser and Falkon. Neither Manuel or I speak Dutch, but we are committed to maintaining the these packages as well as we can going forward. Splitting source packages ------------------------- One of the problems with the dutch package was that it was created with an amalgamation of source files combined by previous maintainers. In order to deal with this correctly, the source for the hunspell-nl binary package has been split out into a separete hunspell-nl source package, currently available in experimental: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/hunspell-nl https://salsa.debian.org/debian/hunspell-nl The dutch source package has been refactored to reflect the current upstream source and will continue to produce the wdutch binary package, as can currently be seen in experimental. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dutch https://salsa.debian.org/debian/dutch No DFSG-free source for aspell-nl and idutch -------------------------------------------- The previous maintainers were using a script to generate part of the contents of aspell-nl and idutch from the wordlist contained in wdutch. However, aspell-nl and idutch are not complete without other files for which we are unable to find a DFSG-free upstream source. The aspell-nl files we are not able to determine a source or license for are: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/dutch/-/tree/8e4f31e3584f8c8325653fad7566ebb0b9025b9b/aspell There is an upstream aspell-nl dictionary with different files available at: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/nl/ However, it is released under a decidedly DFSG-non-free license: "All provided material can be used freely. Copying is only allowed if the package is distributed complete and unchanged." The idutch file we are not able to determine a source or license for is: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/dutch/-/tree/8e4f31e3584f8c8325653fad7566ebb0b9025b9b/ispell There are some abandoned idutch upstream files archived online They are over 25 years old and do not contain any license information. https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/ispell-dictionaries.html#Dutch-dicts Conclusion ---------- Unless a suitable DFSG-free source can be found, we will stop shipping aspell-nl and idutch in Debian. It is unclear how much value these packages currently provide. They are both older dictionary formats that have largely been replaced by Hunspell or Wordlist. Both aspell-nl and idutch are recommended by task-dutch. Unless there are objections and the identification of a suitable upstream source, the plan is to file a bug report against task-dutch to remove the recommendation of aspell-nl and idutch. Please CC Manuel Guerra and myself in any replies as we are not subscribed to this mailing list.
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