Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))

2008-07-01 Thread Thibaut Paumard


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.



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Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))

2008-07-01 Thread Peter Samuelson

[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/


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Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian

2008-07-01 Thread Bernhard R. Link
* Hendrik Sattler [EMAIL PROTECTED] [080701 14:33]:
 No, you have to get rid of the stubborn users, first ;)

 @Bernhard: How about configuring you keyboard to whatever fits you better than
 the multikey sequence?

And waste keys for characters I can just write well (and just needing to
press the multi-key before entering characters in non-Latex sources?)

 Or buy a keyboard with a german layout...
 If you really want to, it is not that hard to do.

I usually use German keyboards, (as I do not have problems with \,
which is the most often heared example for other keyboards).
And my .vim/ftplugin/tex.vim contains:
imap ä a
imap ö o
imap ü u
imap ß s
imap Ä A
imap Ö O
imap Ü U

If you are used to read them, there is really no reason not to use
this encoding, they are superior in almost any respect.

And no matter if you can understand this or not, there are many people
thinking that way. And those will want to have a spell checker installed
that can cope with those.

BTW: if someone is implementing a better tex support for hunspell to
make more latex-users wanting to switch to it, what about also
supporting to get the languages from the \usepackage[...]{babel}
options and switching of the dictionaries over \selectlanguage?

Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link


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Samuelson's Law (was: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian)

2008-07-01 Thread Ben Finney
Peter Samuelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 [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.

It would not be a corollary, since it doesn't follow logically from
Godwin's Law.

Perhaps Samuelson's Law, since you're proposing it :-)

-- 
 \“When I was a baby I kept a diary. Recently I was re-reading |
  `\   it, it said ‘Day 1: Still tired from the move. Day 2: Everybody |
_o__)  talks to me like I'm an idiot.’” —Steven Wright |
Ben Finney


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Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))

2008-07-01 Thread Brian May
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


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Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))

2008-07-01 Thread Michael Tautschnig
 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



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Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))

2008-06-30 Thread Bernhard R. Link
* 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


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Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))

2008-06-29 Thread Hendrik Sattler
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


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Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))

2008-06-29 Thread Michael Tautschnig
 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



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Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian

2008-06-26 Thread Per Olofsson
Hi,

Don Armstrong wrote:
 I have no idea if it's trivially possible, but it would be ideal if
 whatever spell checker we switched to had some sort of compatibility
 layer for ispell to reduce the number of applications that are
 affected by such a migration.

Both hunspell and aspell have such compatibility modes. However, most
applications simply call 'ispell', so maybe that name should be managed through
alternatives.

-- 
Pelle


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Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian

2008-06-26 Thread Agustin Martin
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 10:52:43AM +0200, Per Olofsson wrote:
 Hi,
 
 Don Armstrong wrote:
  I have no idea if it's trivially possible, but it would be ideal if
  whatever spell checker we switched to had some sort of compatibility
  layer for ispell to reduce the number of applications that are
  affected by such a migration.
 
 Both hunspell and aspell have such compatibility modes. However, most
 applications simply call 'ispell', so maybe that name should be managed 
 through
 alternatives.

For aspell that alternative should be to the aspell ispell wrapper
(currently an example under /usr/share/doc/aspell/examples/ispell)

Also we should make sure that old ispell dict names are honoured. aspell has
alias that should already do that for most dicts, but for hunspell we may
need to add symlinks like spanish{.aff,dic} - es_ES.{aff,dic}

-- 
Agustin


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Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))

2008-06-25 Thread Agustin Martin
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


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