Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>> So would you think that providing dictionaries as native packages and
>> enabling OOo to load "system" dictionaries is what distributors want?
> 
> What distributors want is for projects to make their task of creating
> native packages easier, by making available raw materials that need the
> minimum of work to be turned into packages that will pass their
> distribution QA.
> 
> While they are similar the technical packages and the packaging
> guidelines/policies vary from distro to distro, so going the last mile
> and providing actual native packages is not helpful.

Sorry for being unclear, I wanted to say something else: if we allowed
to build and use native packages from the dictionaries contributed to
OOo easily - would that be what is needed?
That of course implies that we build such packages ourselves for our
"vanilla" builds but distriutors will be free to rebuild them to their
own likings (as they do for other stuff).

I know that the OOo build and packaging system is a little bit "baroque"
but that's nothing we/I can change immediately and it's also off-topic
on this list, I assume. But it could add something to my next question:

> If SUN and/or OO.o wanted to move hunspell dicts to a neutral ground, in
> the hope of getting people not interested in OO.o to contribute, I'd
> advise targeting freedesktop.org. But for this move to succeed the
> contribution should include manpower to make the project survive its
> first years (not just a file archive), and an understanding this kind of
> contribution would probably never totally stop, just be joined by
> others.

Well, it's not our primary interest to move hunspell dicts to a neutral
ground but it's our interest to be a "good player" in the game. Wrt.
dictionaries that means to me: support platform based solutions if
possible. That's what I tried to explain in some of my mails in this
thread.

We have to find out how we can make building "non-code" (not only
dictionary) packages in OOo easier and we are already developing ideas
for that. For the moment we shouldn't stress that, we are willing to
improve.
> Every major distribution has localisation groups, so do GNOME and KDE.
> I'd imagine they'd be keen on improving hunspell dictionaries, if
> working on them didn't require a major OO.o investment. 

As dictionaries don't need sophisticated building the "investment" would
be using the OOo code repository for contributing and getting them,
creating packages can happen outside of OOo's build system (as I
understand that's what distributors would prefer anyway).

If OOo supported "system integrated" dictionaries all could work
together fine, so our main contribution to this topic would be freeing
OOo from the legacy that dictionaries need to be installed somewhere in
share/dict or user/wordbook. This will definitely happen until 3.0.

At the moment I would just like to see if this goes in the right
direction. Then we could follow up once OOo's support for "system
integrated" dictionaries is available.

BTW: having a common understanding amongst distributors about the
"right" place for dictionaries (FHS?) would help a lot. Does anybody
know something about this?

Ciao,
Mathias

-- 
Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer
OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS
Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]".
I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it.

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