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en-wl / wordlist

SCOWL (and friends).
http://wordlist.aspell.net
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aspell/-en.spec deprecation in Fedora #390

Closed BrianInglis closed 5 months ago

BrianInglis commented 9 months ago

Fedora deprecated the packages aspell/-en.spec, and possibly others, (see below for text); as initiated by @ljavorsk: they are maintained by @nforro. As SCOWL/wordlist is the upstream source for many (most?) English locale dictionaries around the world, used in many products (possibly because of MIT/BSD/PD licensing), and aspell(1) is required to manage and build the aspell and hunspell dictionaries, which are the main English dictionaries used by the aspell and hunspell packages, and the enchant library, and also used and supported by other packages, this appears to risk making it impossible to build updated English locale dictionaries on Fedora, and possibly other updated language dictionaries, if aspell(1) is also required to manage and build their aspell and hunspell dictionaries, also used by the enchant library, and other packages.

# IMPORTANT # This package has been deprecated since Fedora 39 # The reason behind this is that upstream has been inactive for more than 4 years # and there are other variants like hunspell or enchant which has active upstream # FESCo approval is located here: https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/3009 # Change proposal is located here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/AspellDeprecation

[I would have commented on Fedora, but attempts to get accounts via Fesco or pagure went nowhere, and I noticed the same ids for names on GH as on Fedora.]

ljavorsk commented 9 months ago

Hi, yes I've authored the change and deprecated the aspell package in Fedora. However, deprecation is not removal. It only disallows new packages that come into Fedora to require a deprecated package.

Also, if anyone in Fedora thinks that the aspell package shouldn't be deprecated, they can un-deprecate it and maintain it. Is this your case?

BrianInglis commented 9 months ago

No Fedora connection directly, but I'm Cygwin SCOWL and hunspell-en maintainer: Cygwin is SourceWare hosted conjoined with our libc newlib, often used together for embedded/RT development on Windows hosts, as well as just a nice POSIX (and Linux compatible) environment for those who (have to?) use Windows at work or home. Cygwin volunteer project leads (some RedHat employees) and maintainers watch what Fedora does with packages, as another RedHat related distro, using similar naming e.g -devel, applying Fedora policies to packages for legal and licence related reasons, using some of your patches (as well as some OpenSUSE and Debian) from your (and their) source repos. For SCOWL English dicts, aspell is a build-dep for aspell-en and hunspell-en, as it is in Fedora spec. So without aspell, no English dictionaries in our distros, and such a Fedora policy change concerns me as an English speaking Cygwin maintainer, knowing that some maintainers use Fedora to cross-/build their packages and test under Wine or in a Windows VM.

ljavorsk commented 9 months ago

Does it also apply even when the aspell package is not removed from Fedora? Because it isn't.