Hi!
As some of you have probably noticed, I recently added local
dictionary support to DictionaryReader. DictionaryReader currently
installs a copy of the Jargon file along with it in the application
resources.
The used file format is the same file format used by the dict server
from dict.org, so it's compatible to the dictionaries you can
retrieve for the dict server.
Now I wonder how I'm going to get the dictionaries when the
application is launched. The resource-solution is okay for the Jargon
file, but other dictionaries may have other licenses. I certainly
don't want to get involved with licensing issues. ;-)
The constraints I keep in mind are:
A) I probably want to have icons for the dictionaries later. Bundles
would be perfect for that, but if this is not acceptable, the icons
can also be stored in the main application. (There don't seem to be
more than 20 appropriate dictionaries in the public domain.)
B) The dict server can read from gzipped dictionaries, while
DictionaryReader can't do that unless there's a gzip-transparent
implementation for FileHandle. So DictionaryReader will probably need
to gunzip and save its dictionaries to a local folder in any case.
Here are the solutions I came up with:
1) Bundling dictionaries in bundles or something similar while
providing a tool to convert dictionaries to those bundles.
+ Licensing is no problem
- A lot of work for each user
- Is is possible to create bundles without code?
+ Icons can be packaged along with the dictionary
+ Dictionaries wouldn't need to be unzipped.
2) Searching the system for installed Dict-style dictionaries. (Most
distributions provide a dict-file package that accompanies the dict
server.)
+ Licensing is no problem
+ Dictionaries are system-wide
- Either on-the-fly-unzipping or copying to home directory needed.
(Not yet solved)
- Users will need to install the dictionary package, which ofter
depends on the installation of the dict.org server (at least on FreeBSD)
- Icons aren't packaged with the dictionaries
3) Hard-coding the FTP URLs to the dict.org dictionaries into
DictionaryReader and making them fetchable from the GUI
+ Licensing is no problem
+ Easy for users
- Icons aren't packaged with the dictionaries
- no system-wide dictionary installation
- dict.org needs to provide the dictionaries via HTTP, too. (IIRC
there's no FTP support in Foundation/GS-Base)
4) Fetching and installing dictionaries as part of the build process.
- Licensing issues just *moved* to the time when Etoile is shipped
in binary form. :-/
+ Easy to use
+ "Bundles" (see above) can be used
Has someone already had a similar problem? What solution do you suggest?
-Günther
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