dictionaries, aspell/myspell/hunspell and so on.

[Caolan McNamara]

Spell checking in our desktop is sort of a bit messy.

At the moment OpenOffice.org 2.0.X uses hunspell, the successor of
"myspell". Our OOo build has these hunspell libs as part of the OOo
install.

The various hunspell dictionaries are then bundled in each OOo langpack.

I see that our Fedora Thunderbird contains a copy of myspell lib, but no
bundled dictionaries (?) So it's a unfortunate that OOo has dictionaries
for a pile of languages which thunderbird is unaware of, but would be
able to use without (probably) too much effort.

And then we have our traditional aspell and the various aspell
dictionaries.

Recently I see that vim has added some sort of support for using the OOo
hunspell/myspell dictionaries,
(http://ftp.vim.org/vim/runtime/spell/README.txt)
But I'm not sure what our fedora vim's status is here re that.

So, here's the hunspell webpage http://hunspell.sourceforge.net
and some commentary on aspell/hunspell/myspell and firefox
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/016618.html

So what would be our *ideal* situation here ?
>From my side it'd be something like...

a) standalone hunspell (easy)
b) OOo uses standalone hunspell (easy, maybe a bit of tweaking
   to autodetect system install dictionaries instead of existing config
   files)
c) firefox/thunderbird migrates from myspell to hunspell
   (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319778) and
   autodetects available dictionaries
d) something or other is done to sanity-ify the vim usage of the
hunspell dictionaries to use them directly to avoid the rather baroque
procedure of the vim spell README (?)
e) someone else maintains the various hunspell per-language dictionaries
as separate rpms :-)
f) migrate other stuff from aspell to hunspell ? Add some aspell
compatibility stuff to hunspell to be a drop in replacement for aspell ?
Keep aspell, tweak it to handle hunspell dictionaries ? Ignore that the
hunspell dictionaries are just extended aspell dictionaries, and keep
the parallel set of aspell format dictionaries and aspell.

C.