bug#17742: Acknowledgement (Support for enchant?)

From:

Reuben Thomas

Subject:

Date:

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 22:04:55 +0000

On 19 December 2016 at 21:47, Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org> wrote:

Having discovered that Aspell does not provide this information (I checked again, and ispell-aspell-find-dictionary does not find this information in the dictionaries, except for limited information about otherchars; for casechars and not-casechars it defaults to [:alpha:]), I shall investigate with the hunspell maintainers.

Hunspell has an open bug to export an API to get the casechars (which hunspell calls "WORDCHARS"):

https://github.com/hunspell/hunspell/issues/282

It has been added to the 2.0 milestone. So it seems there is light at the end of this particular tunnel.

I've added a comment that it would be good to have a way to get this information from the hunspell binary too.

My suggestion on how to proceed would therefore be:

1. Assuming my patches to enchant are accepted sooner rather than later, and there's a minor Enchant release soon, then accept an initial implementation of Enchant support in Emacs with a fixed casechars value. This is no worse than for Aspell.

1a. If someone wants to add a way for Emacs to parse hunspell dictionaries when used via Enchant, that's fine by me as a temporary workaround.

2. When hunspell 2 is released, hopefully there will be an official channel for Emacs to get this information. Any workaround introduced as per 1a above would now be more solid.

3. Once one of Enchant's supported engines has an official way to get this information, then it's a good time to add an API to Enchant too (and support in the standalone binary).

Overall, there's no hurry. We have precise casechars for hunspell dictionaries today (though as I mentioned elsewhere, there may still be problems with using them). Enchant support for now is useful for the spelling checkers it supports that Emacs does not; obviously, Emacs's direct hunspell support is better for now than via Enchant. It would be nice to fix that eventually and use only Enchant, but there's no need to rush.

http://rrt.sc3d.org