Re: [aspell-devel] Re: GNU Aspell 0.60 Released

[Brian Nelson]

On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 09:59:32PM -0600, Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Brian Nelson wrote:
> 
> > I'm still working with the Debian dictionaries-common maintainer (since
> > d-c already does the same for ispell) on generating the dictionary
> > hashes at install time instead of at build time.  
> 
> OK.  When compiling the dictionary Aspell checks if the input is valid in
> various ways.  Some of them, especially the ones that check if an affix
> flags is valid and applicable, can be time consuming.  It is safe to turn
> these off if no warning are reported when compiling the word list.  The
> options of interest are "validate-affixes" and "validate-words".

OK, good to know.

> Earlier you mentioned the problem of installing both Aspell 0.50 and 
> Aspell 0.60 due to the fact that I chose not to increment the so-name.  I 
> have attempted to remedy this situation by adding an compile time option 
> to increment the so-name.  Have you looked into this possibility?

I've thought about it, but I think it's better (for Debian anyway) to
keep the soname the same.  Changing the soname would require rebuilding
of all packages using the library (~30 or so) and the dictionaries,
whereas keeping the soname would only require rebuilding the
dictionaries.

The transition could be gradual since the libaspell15 and the new
library (libaspell16?) could coexist, but I don't think there's much
benefit to keeping two libraries around.  Transitions of this scale are
pretty painless in Debian anyway.  It would also require the additional
maintenance burden of another package (aspell-0.50 and aspell-0.60).

Note that the aspell-en => aspell6-en and aspell-dictionary =>
aspell6-dictionary renaming is an alternate way of solving the problem
of dictionary format incompatibility that changing the soname also
solves (which was my original concern, IIRC).  I still need to discuss
it with some other Debian people, but I think this solution, or some
variation of it, will be the least painful. 

-- 
Blast you and your estrogenical treachery!