Bug#1020387: dictionaries-common: Consensus regarding the packaging of the Qt WebEngine hunspell binary dictionaries

[Lisandro Damian Nicanor Perez Meyer]

On jueves, 16 de febrero de 2023 02:40:21 -03 Rene Engelhard wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Am 16.02.23 um 02:24 schrieb Lisandro Damian Nicanor Perez Meyer:
> > - Hunspell dictionaries should be handled by... hunspell. Yes, I know
> > this was
> > considered and it's still not possible. But the fact that webengine ships
> > them is not enough a reason to expose them to the world instead of doing
> > the right thing: handling them there.
> 
> Then make it use hunspell.
> 
> Unpatched and with the same format.
> 
> It's not as if hunspell invented a binary format for no gain at all
> instead of just differentiating for differentiating.
> 
> Same with an internal *patched* hunspell copy.

I agree with that, and actually is one of the many reasons why I was against 
uploading qt6-webengine in the first place.

> > - If the patches are taken and at some point webengine upstreams decide to
> > switch to something else then we the Qt maintainers get the broken pieces.
> > Insta RC bugs, we get this package stopped from migrating to testing until
> > solving the issue... a pain.
> 
> e.g.
> 
> That is already the case. All packages building bdic right now *are*
> laready using it (and be it via usage of installdeb-myspell which calls
> the binary):
> 
> root at frodo:/# apt-cache showsrc igerman98
> Package: igerman98
> Binary: ingerman, iswiss, wngerman, wswiss, rmligs-german,
> hunspell-de-at, hunspell-de-ch, hunspell-de-de, aspell-de
> Version: 20161207-11
> Maintainer: Roland Rosenfeld <roland at debian.org>
> Uploaders: Rene Engelhard <rene at debian.org>
> Build-Depends: debhelper-compat (= 13)
> Build-Depends-Indep: aspell, busybox, dictionaries-common-dev (>=
> 1.29.3), hunspell, qt6-webengine-dev-tools, ispell
> [...]
>
> > So no, I'm totally against these change. Dmitry, Patrick: my suggestion is
> > to reverse the patches.
> 
> If you  revert the virtual package it's still too late. And it
> complicates things even more since then people need to change their
> build-dependency (and maybe calls) explicitely, causing more PITA.

The virtual package for Qt 6 is commited but not uploaded.

See, with the current status if tomorrow webengine stops providing hunspell 
dictionaries then we Qt maintainers have no obligation against packages using 
them: they where never meant to be used for packages not really using Qt 6.

On the other hand going ahead with this means this becomes official API-like 
behavior.
 
> The virtual package will help with that in that this will automagically
> happen.
> 
> 
> And the whole bdic  thingy: It's there, in in qtwebengine itself.
> dictionaries-commons policy, in installdeb-myspell --bdic-only etc.
> 
> And Soren has a point, Debian should support those .bdic files is
> possible, how broken their existence may be.

Then fork the hunspell code out of webengine and provide a proper package. 
That won't break at webengine's developers will.