[aspell-announce] Serious Help Needed for Aspell and Pspell

[Kevin Atkinson]

In the past I have asked for help, but in specific areas and not
very forcefully.  Well, now I *really* would appreciate some help with
developing Aspell and Pspell.  I would like for Aspell to go to beta by
the end of this summer but I really don't see that happening unless I get
some help.

Some of the areas I could use assistance in:

- Adding Affix compression support for Aspell
- Adding gettext support to Aspell and Pspell
- Making Aspell and Pspell thread safe

And lots of other smaller areas.  I am looking for people who are
competent programmers and have some experience with C++.  I am also looking
for people which have a good deal of shell programming, Perl, and
autotools experience to help me clean up my build system.

Some areas such as thread safety will simply not happen until I get some
help because I really do not know enough about it.

I hate to whine.  However, I have put an extremely large about of unpaid
time into Aspell and would appreciate some giving back from those who use
Aspell in there distribution or have used the Pspell library as part of
there applications, especially with those with the resources to do so such
as Open Source companies.

I release that my code, especially Aspell's, can be a bit scary with all
the complex C++, however I will be glade to help any one with this part
and for most of the tasks I need help with, one really don't even need to
know C++ that well.  Here is a breakdown of the tasks I would like help
with and the skills required.

Task: Adding Affix compression support for Aspell

Skills: Competent programmer with some C++ knowledge.  I know exactly what
needs to be done in this area so it will require very little knowledge of
how Aspell works.

Task: Adding gettext support to Aspell and Pspell

Skills:  Competent programmer with C++ knowledge and gettext knowledge. I
don't know what needs to be done in this area however they shouldn't have
to study Aspell that intensely as most of my text strings are concentrated
together.  They may also need to rework some of my strings into format
strings (ie convert cout << "Bla.." << name << "..bla.." to something like
"Bla.. $1 ..bla..") so that it can be translated correctly.  However I
have an idea how this should be done.

Task: Making Aspell and Pspell thread safe.

Skills:  Competent programmer with good C++ and thread safety knowledge.  This
is the area where the C++ skills will probably be needed the most.
Even though Aspell itself is not multi-threaded I would like it to be
thread safe so that it can be used by multi-threaded programs. I
have several areas that are potently thread unsafe (such as accessing a
global pool) and need some one to give me advice on how to best do this.
I also have several classes which have the potential of being used by more
than one thread (such as the personal dictionary) and needs to be made
thread safe.

Task: Cleaning up the build system with Aspell and Pspell and similar tasks

Skills: Competent shell programmer (preferably someone with more knowledge
than I have) and a good knowledge of how GNU autoconf, automake, and libtool
work.

Task: Help with making the Aspell Dicts build system more robust

Skills: Competent shell programmer (preferably someone with more knowledge
than I have) and a good enough knowledge of Perl to understand everything in
in my "proc" script (http://aspell.sourceforge.net/
aspell-gen-0.9.tar.bz2).

Task: Miscellaneous other programming Tasks as I (or someone else) thinks of
them

Skills: Competent programmer with good C++ knowledge.

Once Aspell is complete (ie gets into a beta state) you are really going
to appreciate it.  It will be able to do everything ispell can do and a
*lot* more.  However, I need some help in getting there.

With out some serious help it is highly likely that Aspell will not be
able to be complete (ie reach a beta state) till next summer as I won't be
able to work on Aspell a great deal once School starts up again.

Thanks in advance for anyone who can offer be some help.

---
Kevin Atkinson
kevina at users sourceforge net
http://www.ibiblio.org/kevina/