Aspell Status as of Sep 22

[Kevin Atkinson]

Aspell 0.50.2 should be out with in a couple of weeks.  A good number of 
bugs have been fixed.  However, I am still trying to track down a bug with 
ispell.el.  If you are interested in the most stable version of Aspell you 
can use the "rel_0_50-branch" of the CVS version of Aspell.

A decent deal of work has been done toward Aspell 0.51 in the past 
month:

* Aspell now has gettext support thanks to Sergey Poznyakoff.  Current 
the only locale supported is "es".  Now would be a good time to consider 
adding gettext support for your language.

* Rudimentary Loadable filter support has been added thanks to Sergey 
Poznyakoff.  Christoph Hintermüller is working with me to improve it.

* I reworked the way soundslike lookups are handles typo-analysis is used.  
This cut the suggestion time in most cases anywhere from 1/2 to 1/4 and in
some cases even better.  It also reduces the size of the compiled Aspell
dictionary by roughly 20%.

All of these changes can be found in the latest CVS version of Aspell.  If 
there is enough interest I will create a snapshot to make trying it out 
easier.

Also:

* I am on the verge of adding affix support to Aspell.  Furthermore, I 
have figured out a way to support both soundslike lookup and affix 
compression at the same time.  Something, which I previously didn't think 
was possible.

* Lutz Horn has converted roughly half of the Aspell manual to texinfo 
format.  I am not sure if he is going to have time to finish the task.  
So, if anyone is interested in picking up where he left off please let me 
know.

There are still a decent number of jobs that remain to be done.  So if you 
are interested in helping me with one of these tasks please email me at 
address@hidden Good C++ skills are needed for most of these tasks 
involving coding.

I am also still looking for someone to eventually take over the
maintenance and development of Aspell. If you are interested please
contact me directly.

* Clean up copyright notices and bring the Aspell package up to GNU 
  Standards.

* Allow Aspell to check documents which are in UTF-8. The main thing to be 
  done is to get Aspell to display UTF-8 correctly. This will involve 
  being able to get the length of UTF-8 strings and display UTF-8 using 
  the curses library.

* Make Aspell Thread safe. 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. There are several areas of Aspell that that 
  are potently thread unsafe (such as accessing a global pool) and several 
  several classes which have the potential of being used by more than one 
  thread (such as the personal dictionary).

* Create a C++ interface for Aspell on top of the C interface.

* Enhance ispell.el so that it will work better with the new Aspell. 

Kevin Atkinson,
The sole Aspell maintainer

-- 
http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org