Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))
Le 1 juil. 08 à 14:59, Michael Tautschnig a écrit : Am Dienstag, 1. Juli 2008 12:33:18 schrieb Lars Wirzenius: ti, 2008-07-01 kello 12:10 +0200, Thibaut Paumard kirjoitti: Come on, UTF-8 is good. UTF-8 also 16 years old. [...] Surely it's enough age for a character set encoding to be accepted into general use? [...] Debian's Social Contract says that Our priorities are our users and free software. It does _not_ say that Debian should tell users what is good. Right? And further, if our users request that some spellchecker support the LaTeX-style umlauts, then we should better support them. Sure, I didn't want to imply a disagreement here. I was just triggered by the rant against UTF-8. Those tools that don't support UTF-8 should be fixed, but at the same time we must not force users to use it. Indeed, when writing papers in some scientific journals, I stick to 7-bit encoding just to be on the safe side, as I'm not sure of their editorial process. At those moments I'm happy to have a spell-checker that treats LaTeX-style accents correctly (although those are only in proper nouns as those papers are in English anyway). Regards, Thibaut. PGP.sig Description: Ceci est une signature électronique PGP
Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))
[Michael Tautschnig] Debian's Social Contract says that Our priorities are our users and free software. It does _not_ say that Debian should tell users what is good. Right? Would it be appropriate here to propose a corollary to Godwin's Law involving the first sentence of point 4 of the Debian Social Contract? I can't think of a snappy name for the corollary, though. -- Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))
Michael Tautschnig wrote: Debian's Social Contract says that Our priorities are our users and free software. It does _not_ say that Debian should tell users what is good. Right? Taken to the extreme, this would mean Debian would still require insert obsolete kernel version here because some users still need it for obscure reasons. There comes a point when we can no longer support out-dated stuff any more, regardless of what the SC says. At best it takes time and effort on maintaining compatibility that could be better spent elsewhere. Should the priorities be for the users who want the old stuff or the users who want the new stuff? Brian May -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))
Michael Tautschnig wrote: Debian's Social Contract says that Our priorities are our users and free software. It does _not_ say that Debian should tell users what is good. Right? Taken to the extreme, this would mean Debian would still require insert obsolete kernel version here because some users still need it for obscure reasons. There comes a point when we can no longer support out-dated stuff any more, regardless of what the SC says. At best it takes time and effort on maintaining compatibility that could be better spent elsewhere. First of all I should say that the context of my citation has been errornously dropped here. I wrote the above in response to the get yourself a proper keyboard thing. But ... Should the priorities be for the users who want the old stuff or the users who want the new stuff? ... of course Debian must move on and cannot support old cruft forever. In this very specific case, however, there seems to be a viable alternative approaching (aspell includes support in its development version, just seems to be a matter of packaging this one). IMHO it is thus a matter of providing a smooth transition, like keeping ispell in lenny, and dropping it afterwards. Meanwhile hopefully aspell gets released. Best, Michael pgpTJfODUoOSe.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))
* Hendrik Sattler [EMAIL PROTECTED] [080629 18:15]: Am Mittwoch, 25. Juni 2008 21:53:24 schrieb Agustin Martin: Each spellchecker has currently some special features. Fortunately, the only thing where ispell is stronger than the other spellcheckers (support for pseudocharsets like 'a, a, \'a, ... ) is already included in aspell development version, so at that time we can drop ispell without any loss of features. Not sure about hunspell here. What tools are using such pseudo characters, probably because they do not support 8bit character sets? Can't they be fixed to do so? AFAIK, even latex knows the existence of the 8th bit, nowadays. Just because some tool support 8bit characters, that does not mean that using 8 bit characters is good. Especially for latex 1) Choosing encoding issues: Just when almost anyone used latin1 or some bastardisation of that everyone thought it might be safe now to use that, then utf-8 came. 2) Compatibility: there are many old things around still to be used. When modifying some document changing all special characters just to spell check them is not nice. Also when combining many files, having different 8bit encodings is a larger pain. 3) Stability There is still suprisingly many things that can break with 8bit characters. Many of the elementary protocols (like smtp) just do not support it. So one danger more that the additional encoding/decoding will fail somewhere. 4) Easy of use: When using German umlauts on an keyboard without them, using 8 bit characters means having one more keypress (the Multi_Key) for every umlaut (as the multi-key sequences (at least those I can remember) are usually multi-key + babel encoding, guess why). Hochachtungsvoll, Bernhard R. Link -- Never contain programs so few bugs, as when no debugging tools are available! Niklaus Wirth -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))
Am Mittwoch, 25. Juni 2008 21:53:24 schrieb Agustin Martin: Each spellchecker has currently some special features. Fortunately, the only thing where ispell is stronger than the other spellcheckers (support for pseudocharsets like 'a, a, \'a, ... ) is already included in aspell development version, so at that time we can drop ispell without any loss of features. Not sure about hunspell here. What tools are using such pseudo characters, probably because they do not support 8bit character sets? Can't they be fixed to do so? AFAIK, even latex knows the existence of the 8th bit, nowadays. HS -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))
Am Mittwoch, 25. Juni 2008 21:53:24 schrieb Agustin Martin: Each spellchecker has currently some special features. Fortunately, the only thing where ispell is stronger than the other spellcheckers (support for pseudocharsets like 'a, a, \'a, ... ) is already included in aspell development version, so at that time we can drop ispell without any loss of features. Not sure about hunspell here. What tools are using such pseudo characters, probably because they do not support 8bit character sets? Can't they be fixed to do so? AFAIK, even latex knows the existence of the 8th bit, nowadays. Yes, LaTeX does fully support this, but portability of plain files across systems remains an issue and many people thus still prefer to encode umlauts this way. For example, we often share files between Linux, Windows, OS X client. In such situations, 8bit is still horribly unreliable. In theory, of course all of them support 8bit. Best, Michael pgpYq8ewsxbpY.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))
On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 08:49:20PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: [Bernd Zeimetz] I'm forwarding this orphaning bug to debian-devel as I hope this rises the chances to find somebody who is willing to take care of ispell. According to http://ficus-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/ispell.html the version in Debian is pretty outdated, also there's a number of bugs to triage... Given the limitations of ispell, I would instead urge us all to migrate all our packages to use for example hunspell and drop ispell completely from the distribution. It would be a lot easier to maintain a dictionary in Debian if only one format of it needed to be generated, and it would be a lot easier to configure a desktop to use a given dictionary if only one package needed to be configured to use it. Each spellchecker has currently some special features. Fortunately, the only thing where ispell is stronger than the other spellcheckers (support for pseudocharsets like 'a, a, \'a, ... ) is already included in aspell development version, so at that time we can drop ispell without any loss of features. Not sure about hunspell here. And it would be a lot easier to check spelling in any language if all programs supported a spell checker that supported any language, and not only the simple ones with a structure similar to English. :) Regarding aspell vs hunspell, choice is more difficult. aspell has planned support for hunspell .aff files and combined flags like hunspell, but I do not know exactly what is the current status. IIRC aspell has stronger support for deformatters, and interacts better with things like emacs, because can be asked for some things that make ispell.el work better. Cannot speak about other details, but aspell and hunspell maintainers may want to provide additional info. -- Agustin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
