Hi all,

I am forwarding a mail from Kevin Atkinson, GNU Aspell spell checker author regarding the removal of aspell from fedora. Kevin is CCied. Hunspell is planned as a replacement for Aspell.

Hunspell has some bugs related it ZWJ and ZWNJ , ZWSP handling , raised by Malayalam(myself) and Khmer team. But no response in mailing so far..(thread: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=200711010902.41262.k... )

I agree with Kevin and I think softwares like enchant can be used as a solution.

Thanks Santhosh Thottingal

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Kevin Atkinson kevina@gnu.org Date: Mon, 5 May 2008 04:18:01 -0600 (MDT) Subject: [aspell-devel] Help Save Aspell From being Removed from Fedora! To: aspell-devel@gnu.org

[This is a part rant, but posting anyway to hopefully get some feedback]

Based on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary it looks like Aspell is in real danger of being completely removed from Fedora in favor of standardizing every applications to use one Spell Checker for every language. Even if it is not the best spell checker for the language. For the English language I strongly believe Aspell is the best spell checker. I'm afraid that other Linux distributions may follow suit and Aspell may become completely unused, even though it is the best spell checker for the English language.

More generally I believe standardizing on one spell checker is short cited. While I agree it is stupid to have multiple dictionaries for the same language installed, I believe it is even stupider to only use the same spell checker for all languages to avoid this problem. Instead the best spell checker for a given language should be used for all applications using something like Enchant (http://www.abisource.com/enchant/).

If anyone on this list have used Fedora 9 or are more in tune with Fedora development I would like to know.

1) How likely is it that Aspell will be removed from future releases.

2) What if anything can be done about it. Is there anyone I can contact to convince them to make Aspell the default for the English language when at all possible.

3) Am I overreacting.

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