[libvoikko] Libvoikko 3.0rc1

[Harri Pitkänen]

The first release candidate for upcoming major release of libvoikko is ready 
and available at

  http://www.puimula.org/htp/testing/libvoikko-3.0rc1.tar.gz

The release candidate will become the final release unless bugs are found that 
need to be fixed. I invite everyone to test this release as much as they can. 
The final release date has not been decided yet but it will be before the end 
of May, possibly much sooner.

If you have had problems with some applications "losing" Finnish from the list 
of supported spell checking languages (for example Virtaal), please give this 
release a try and report the results. It is now possible to open multiple 
instances of Voikko simultaneously which should fix such problems.

Of course there are many other improvements in this release. Most are at API 
level or in experimental parts (HFST and Apertium) and thus not visible to 
users directly. The grammar checker improvements should however help 
significantly if you think that previous releases have produced too many false 
positives. More detailed list of changes is at the end of this message.

This release should be API and ABI compatible with previous releases. You do 
not need to rebuild applications that were built with older version of 
libvoikko, just replacing the library should be enough. To take fully 
advantage of all grammar checker improvements it is recommended to use Suomi-
malaga 1.6rc2 which was released earlier today.

Harri


    * Various improvements in capitalization checking phase of grammar
      checker.
    * Added -h and --help options to voikkospell.
    * Moved cache size parameter from voikkoInit to a setting.
    * Extended the new API to allow support for multiple languages.
    * Some tests are now run during "make check".
    * Added HFST suggestion generator and hyphenator backend, improved other
      HFST backends.
    * Allow multiple independent handles (dictionaries) to be open in the same
      process. This will also allow multiple threads to use the library
      simultaneously as long as they are using different handles to the
      library.
    * Add option for multi-thread checking to voikkospell.
    * Added dummy/null backends for morphological analysis, spell checking and
      spelling suggestions.
    * Changed option VOIKKO_OPT_IGNORE_NUMBERS to no longer affect spelling
      suggestions, just spell checking.
    * Previous requirement of properly initialized locale environment was
      removed. Libvoikko will no longer modify the process locale on Windows
      (a blocker for thread safe operation).
    * Refactoring of spelling suggestion code.
    * Added experimental Lttoolbox morphology backend.
    * Extended character set functions to support Icelandic language.
    * Refactoring of character set conversion code:
          o Make deprecated VOIKKO_OPT_ENCODING into a no-op.
          o Remove use of iconv. 
    * Refactoring of hyphenation code:
          o Make VOIKKO_INTERSECT_COMPOUND_LEVEL into a no-op. 
    * Fixed #2: Defects in repeating words check
    * Fixed #3: option for listing only incorrect words