[libvoikko] Libvoikko 3.0pre1 available, plans for the near future

[Harri Pitkänen]

Libvoikko 3.0 is starting to reach its final form. I expect the release to 
happen by the end of May. A preview release is available at

  http://www.puimula.org/htp/testing/libvoikko-3.0pre1.tar.gz

If you have time, please test it and report any issues. The remaining changes 
to be done before the release will mostly affect Finnish users. This means 
that international users can consider the release feature complete.

Patches are still accepted if there is pressing need for some feature that did 
not get included. I left the hyphenator API improvements out of this release 
because they would not have immediate benefit for anyone. I will get back to 
them once there is more need. Meanwhile there is more detailed description of 
these changes available in the libvoikko roadmap page. If someone wishes to 
have the improved hyphenator ready sooner you can look there to see what needs 
to be done. It should be quite straightforward (and boring) coding.

I have not yet decided on what to do after libvoikko 3.0. I could change 
openoffice.org-voikko to use the new API from libvoikko 3.0 or write a patch 
to implement this feature that was already done by someone but the patch got 
lost somehow:

  http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=24517

To help me make the right decision I'd like to ask everyone who has ever 
tested libvoikko with some language other than Finnish to answer these 
questions:

1) Which languages you tested?
2) Which backends and morphologies you used?
3) If there are Hunspell dictionaries available for these languages how did 
libvoikko compare to Hunspell in terms of quality of spell checking, speed or 
memory use?

You may send your answers to me directly if you don't want to use this list. 
The important thing is to get as many answers as possible so that I can get a 
good picture on how many people are working on these things and whether there 
are languages that are reaching release quality within this year or so. At the 
moment things are not looking too good, I don't know for sure if anyone other 
than me has ever actually tested these. I'll publish a summary of all answers 
I get in a week or so.

Harri