Nicolas Mailhot pisze:
[for people interested in flames]
OK, let's stop the flame, right? Let me snip therefore most of our
sophisticated insults ;)
A. an authoritative download source (ftp or http directory)
There are OOo mirrors with most stuff that is put on the wiki.
And distributions have better things to do than hunt them down if you're
not interested enough to reference them.
I don't know the mirror URLs but they are encoded in DicOOo, so they
exist. Let's first agree on what you need and then let's prepare the
details, right?
B. raw material in nice versionned archives
Not always feasible. Dictionary maintainers in some cases might be even
dead or we lost contact with them.
And they'll sue you if you put their stuff in an archive with a number?
OK, what I meant is that sometimes it's hard to track versions. But
again, we might use a date. So that's feasible.
C. including licencing statements (in the archives), using well-known
licenses that don't need analysis
The bundled dicts are all LGPL. But we'd need to review that.
Please do. Distributions care about not being sued for copyrighted work
misapropriation.
Fine. But what can we do about work that is incompatible with LGPL? Note
that hyphenation dictionaries are mostly on the standard LaTeX license
that is different from LGPL - they are based on TeX hyphenation
patterns. I tracked the origin of the Polish hyphenation patterns,
double-checked it, and confirmed it. But I was one of the few people
that actually were able to do so - sometimes it's actually very hard. I
can understand your dislike for hunting the licenses - I hate this as well!
E. feedback channels (mailing list, irc channel, bug tracker)
Not feasible. You won't meet dictionary maintainers there if that's what
you mean.
So problems can not be reported, let alone fixed. No distribution will
be confortable with that.
I'm not comfortable with it either. But imposing a new system sometimes
makes little sense for those communities that have such a system (Polish
spelling dictionary has definitely one of the best processes and is
being very actively fixed in case any errors are found). We should
probably make a system for abandoned dictionaries - I filed some patches
for French dictionaries that make them better but there's nobody that
maintains them. So what we need is a dual system - reference to the
original bug-tracking system (if there's one), or use linguistic
project's issuezilla with special keywords. I can only say you're right
in claiming we need to fix it.
They are @ lingucomponent. Coordinating is your job, if you want to be
more than friendly wiki space.
Not really mine, I'm only an observer in this project, trying to help
sometimes ;)
That's why
we need a system that allows you to accept the license (if it's not
LGPL), download the stuff, and install it.
That's why you *think* you need this system, none of your arguments are
even remotely compelling to distro ears, we've all heard them before and
they were as wrong then as they are today. For examples of how it ends,
see the AMD open driver statement or the SUN openjdk statement.
But what can we do about dictionaries that are not really going to be on
LGPL for any reasons? Ignore them or enable users to download them? Note
that for some languages we don't have a choice. See also the extension
idea below.
And that's the root of our contention. You consider this mode "natural",
our users don't (a large part won't install the flash player manually,
or hate doing it, especially on enterprise networks). As long as you
strive emulating Flash you'll find yourself moaning about lack of
distribution support.
I don't find it natural but what can I or you do? I think we need
something better for users than making them use vi to edit the
configuration files, copy them to system-wide directories etc.
The nice thing is that in the near future, hunspell will replace myspell
in Mozilla projects. This means that Firefox dictionaries will be
exactly the same as in OOo.
This means the distros will have another hunspell dictionnary source
hopefully better organised than lingucomponent (not that we really want
to have two sources, but we'll gladly dump the less reasonable of them
if we have a choice)
I wouldn't be so sure about better organization there. They've only
realized that the main EN-US dictionary is not covered by MPL. That was
evident years ago.
Distribution is what distributions do and they started work on this
about a year ago, so you're late.
Am I? How can I install a Hungarian dictionary for OOo in openSuse with
Polish as a main language if I am not an admin? I cannot install such a
package even if I need it, and I'd have to contact the admins. That's
not a solution. That's as bad an idea as to have administrator account
in Windows for installing the dictionary for a single user account.
The idea right now is to enable installing dictionaries as extensions in
OOo, without DicOOo but directly via the web browser (or from the
downloaded files). The idea isn't yet implemented. But it cover the need
for dictionaries that won't change licenses (it's easy to review the
license before installing the extension in OOo right now).
To take a non-software example the DejaVu project (dejavu.sf.net) has
all this right and it got itself distributed by pretty much everyone in
a short span of time (one of the stragglers being OO.o BTW which still
has not realised Vera development stopped years ago)
Fine. But mind you, fonts are easier to maintain than dictionaries.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Fonts cross language
boundaries, so you need to coordinate font designers from different
countries, they're all over the desktop, you have to get them working on
screens with different resolutions, in all the different font backends
application use, and users are extremely sensitive to pixel-level
defects.
Maybe I have no idea, maybe I'm stupid but I've seen more fonts for
Kashubian (that uses complicated special diacritical characters) than
dictionaries. In this respect, you can choose better fonts etc., and
simply ignore the abandoned stuff. In case of dictionaries, you cannot.
Again this is wrong in particulars and in general. Fonts are harder than
dictionaries, distributions are a lot more afraid of font changes than
dictionary changes, and yet DejaVu got itself distributed because it did
what distributions like without dragging feet.
Maybe for some languages fonts are harder than dictionaries but for
Finnish, we haven't got a single good open source dictionary yet - it's
the language that is too hard for most spell-checking. But we have lots
of fonts that work with Finnish texts. This is what I mean.
You could take perl as another example. CPAN has its own direct
distribution method. But you know, 90% of linux users get their perl
through distro packages instead. And the CPAN guys mostly understand it,
they don't try to push everyone to their direct download system, they
help distributions distribute their stuff in deb/rpm/whatever form, and
everyone is happy.
OK, that's a good example. You've made your point.
Regards,
Marcin
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