Bug#832631: Please ship spell files

James McCoy jamessan at debian.org
Wed Jul 27 21:29:37 UTC 2016


On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 01:43:58PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> vim-runtime ships spelling files for English.  Neovim strips those out, and
> only offers a mechanism to download the spell files at runtime.  Please
> consider packaging current versions of the spell files for various languages in
> Debian,

At one time[0] we tried doing this.  However, we removed the packages
because no one was able to successfully build all the languages.  I
remember my computer being unresponsive for a few hours due to the
memory being consumed by trying to build the spellfiles.

> so people can obtain those files through the package manager, rather
> than assuming connectivity at the time they first try to enable the 'spell'
> option.

We've fallen back on this, since that at least works.  I'd consider
removing the English spellfiles from the Vim packaging just so there's
parity.

> Ideally, vim could use one of the many other sources of spelling information
> available in Debian, rather than its own.  Vim's help files suggest that it can
> use Hunspell files.

Yes, that's what I'd like to have time to complete.  I was initially[1]
trying to use libenchant since that gives the user more flexibility, but
it doesn't fit well into Vim's expectations from the spell checker.

RedHat has a patch to use Hunspell, but it wasn't clean enough for
upstream to accept.  I've switched my focus from libenchant to trying to
provide a proper set of patches for direct Hunspell support (either as a
fallback if Vim's spell files don't exist and the download fails) or as
a replacement for using Vim's spell files.  However, I've had too many
projects competing for my time to finish that yet.

Oh, I see we've discussed this before in #647325. :)

[0]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vim-spellfiles
[1]: https://github.com/jamessan/vim/blob/pu/enchant-fallback/README.md

Cheers,
-- 
James
GPG Key: 4096R/91BF BF4D 6956 BD5D F7B7  2D23 DFE6 91AE 331B A3DB



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