[libvoikko] Libreoffice-voikko binaries

[Harri Pitkänen]

On Friday 09 September 2011, Sjur Moshagen wrote:
> Since we have a lot of Macs in our team, and an interest in getting this
> out to our end users, I guess we (that is, the Divvun team) could at least
> try and see how it develops (exceptionally Cc-ing the Divvun team so they
> are informed).

Great!

> Since I have worked out (and documented) how to build the prerequisites of
> ooovoikko including hfst support and universal binaries, it should not be
> impossible to maintain. There will certainly be issues, esp. related to
> supporting older systems (LibreOffice supports MacOS 10.4 and ppc
> processors, I have only compiled for Intel & 10.5 so far, but I guess I
> will have to redo that to also suppport ppc and earlier OS releases).

It is unclear how long LibreOffice will support 10.4 and in any case lots of 
others (Mozilla, Adobe etc.) seem to have dropped the support for it and/or 
PPC processors. In fact openoffice.org/libreoffce-voikko has never even been 
tested on PPC Macs, I doubt it would even build there.

I would say don't worry about older systems if you are more comfortable and 
productive working with 10.5.

> We'll try. Questions will be posted here:)

Ok.

> As the number of laguages covered by the Libreoffice-voikko extension is
> about to increase (possibly quite a lot), the question is whether one
> should split the library from the languages. I think this question has
> been raised and discussed earlier, but I am unable to find any pointers
> now, and I don't think a conclusion was reached.

Installing just one extension is easier for users than installing extension 
and dictionaries separately. Thus I think we should offer multiple extensions 
containing the library and dictionary or dictionaries for single language. 
This provides the best user experience for typical users with simple needs.

For those who need to write in multiple languages covered by Voikko we have to 
provide separate dictionary packs. Those would be application independent 
packages instead of LibreOffice extensions.

If the number of supported languages starts to grow significantly I will start 
writing patches to move the library code directly into LibreOffice. Should 
they be accepted into LibreOffice, LibreOffice-voikko would become gradually 
obsolete which of course would be excellent. But let's see if/when that 
happens. It's quite possible that we still need to revise the dictionary 
format to make it truly competetive with Hunspell. Such revisions are much 
easier to make while the code is not yet part of the core product.

Harri