Vim 7 includes a native spellchecker. It uses its own spell file format which can be created using Myspell *.aff/*.dic files (the same as for Mozilla and OpenOffice). The spell files are rather large, so it's not feasible to bundle them with vim unconditionally.
Building a spell file from source is tricky and requires huge amounts
of RAM and some fairly obscure dependencies. Upstream ship pre-built
spell files, and I believe it would make most sense for us to use
those.
Note that spell files have to be generated for each internal character
set that may be used. This generally means utf-8 (used by gtk2/qt gvim
internally no matter what) and the appropriate iso-8859- code for the
country in question.
As it stands, English is installed with vim-core. I might remove this
if spell checking ends up as an optional feature. For the rest, I'm
proposing separate packages, one per language, for the different spell
files. Character set decisions will be left up to upstream, and the
user will not get to restrict this further.
I don't intend to maintain these myself (I speak a couple of other
languages well enough to verify that the package works, but I'd rather
not get involved any further), but I'd like to make it easy for
non-Vim-herd people to do so. Naming-wise, vim-spell-${two letter
language code} seems sanest.
Proposed vim-spell.eclass:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm/tmp/vim-spell.eclass
It includes instructions on how to make a spell source package. The
ebuilds should be extremely simple -- only VIM_SPELL_LANGUAGE, LICENSE,
KEYWORDS and IUSE need to be set, along with one inherit line.
Questions:
* app-vim or app-dicts for the spell files?
* Will there be sufficient interest from other developers to make this
worthwhile?
* Is anyone going to get upset about the character set decisions?
* Does anyone think we should make users build spell lists from source,
even though it can require several GBytes of RAM?
--
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron)
Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm
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