On Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:43:07 -0800 Don Armstrong <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Feb 2026, Kevin Atkinson wrote:n > > New official releases of SCOWL itself will not be created for some > > time now as the underlying architecture has undergone a complete > > overhaul and it will be a while before things stabilize. > > Thanks for the information. Can you let me know how we'll know that > things have stabilized enough for a release? Yes, but I do not have an ETA right now. > > I am writing to request that the Debian source package be updated to use > > this new dictionary release. I suggest you check out SCOWL directly > > from Git at https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist. You can either just > > check out the 'v2' branch to always get the latest version. Or, if > > you want to track dictionary releases you can use the associated tag > > created for each release. The latest one is 'rel-2026.02.25'. > > Are you planning on making releases on github from now on? [Looks like > the 2026.02.25 is the first release there.] That will help us notice > that you've made a new release. [We typically track a specific release, > but I can also track your git repo going forward to help with cherry > picking and replaying any patches that we have on top of it.] Yes. I would track git moving forward through. For stability you can use the tag associated with the release. > Should we also plan on forwarding any issues to you as github issues > (until you tell us differently)? Please. > It'll probably be a few weeks before I finalize updating the packaging > in Debian for this new release. Okay. I was looking over the source release and I noticed a few things. The copyright needs to be updated. The mk-list command has been ported over and can now output UTF-8, which can save you some iconv calls. It may be better to use the new scowl word-list command though. The scripts in speller/ have been ported over. Do note that they still mostly work with ISO-8859-1 encoding. I notice you hacked the `make-hunspell-dict` script to use size 70. 60 is the recommend size for the spell checker dictionary. Please see the generated Hunspell README for the differences between the default and large size and why I recommend the 60 size. If you still want to use the larger size I recommend you just use the large Hunspell dictionaries created. The larger Hunspell dictionaries also include common variants in which you will not get by hacking the size. A better option may be to package both the default and large dictionaries and provide some mechanism to select the one to use by default. With regard to the /usr/share/dict/ files/packages. Note: * the default uses size 50, I recommend you bump that to 60. The 50 size does not get a lot of attention and is not very useful. * The insane size is gone, the scripts will still work but it will include a lot less words. I recommend you drop it. * Some words at the 80 size were bumped to the 85 size; you might want to change the huge size to 85 to avoid dropping words. Please see the README for the difference between these sizes. * you use `-v2` (which translates to up to level 6 (acceptable)). I do not recommend this as it will include uncommon variants. If you want variants I recommend you use `-v1` (which translates to up to level 4 (common)) My personal recommendation is to not include variants until the large size, but it really depends on what people use those files for. Given all the above I recommend you change the SIZE related var. in the `rules` file to: SIZES=small "" large huge SIZE_OPTIONS_small:=-v0 35 SIZE_OPTIONS:=-v0 60 SIZE_OPTIONS_large:=-v1 70 SIZE_OPTIONS_huge:=-v2 85 This will not include most variants until the large size, and then at the huge size let in the acceptable ones. If you rather include the variants I recommend this: SIZES=small "" large huge SIZE_OPTIONS_small:=-v1 35 SIZE_OPTIONS:=-v1 60 SIZE_OPTIONS_large:=-v2 70 SIZE_OPTIONS_huge:=-v2 85 # or maybe -v3 (level 8, archaic) # to let in everything This will let in the common variants up to the default size and then at the large and huge level let in the acceptable ones. Please see the README for a detailed explanation of the variant levels. If you want more fine grain control (for example to also include `uncommon` variants without also including archaic ones) you will need to switch to use the word-list command from scowl utility. Kevin
