[libvoikko] hfst-ospell and Windows [Was: The future of zhfst]

[Francis Tyers]

El dc 11 de 12 de 2013 a les 21:01 +0200, en/na Harri Pitkänen va
escriure:
> On Wednesday 11 December 2013 16:17:40 Sjur Moshagen wrote:
> > That is, the only external dependency required for libarchive except system
> > libs seems to be zlib. This is quite reasonable, and means that the total
> > list of dependencies for hfst support in Libvoikko is now down to the
> > following:
> > 
> > * hfst-ospell
> > * tinyxml
> > * libarchive
> > * zlib
> > 
> > I don’t see how this list can be squeezed further, and I don’t see any major
> > need for it either.
> 
> That looks good to me.
> 
> > Now - back to the original subject: with the dependency list considerably
> > shortened, would it be possible to enable hfst support by default, and
> > build and release a version of the LibreOffice Voikko plugin with Hfst
> > support enabled? This is the One Big Thing that everyone in the
> > Giellatekno/Divvun community is waiting for, since being able to support
> > the Windows users is the number one requirement.
> 
> I think we can use the already released (binary version of) libreoffice-voikko 
> for Windows. We just need to build another version of libvoikko with the 
> necessary dependencies enabled.
> 
> I will have a look at it before the end of year. But who will handle 
> documentation and support for the end users? I think it should be someone who 
> knows the target language(s). If we can find two or three people who agree to 
> do this for at least few years we could set up a localized download site under 
> our web site. I could take care of providing Windows builds and supporting the 
> Finnish users.
> 
> Looking at the mailing list archives I see no responses to my release 
> candidate announcements for libvoikko 3.7rc1, 3.6.1rc1 or 3.6rc1 which are the 
> three releases that have shipped with HFST as a non-experimental backend. 
> There are no automated tests that cover HFST support. And there are no 
> downstream users of libvoikko that are known to enable HFST support (if we 
> don't count the people who develop the library or related technologies). Thus 
> we should still require --enable-hfst so that people who _build_ the library 
> know that they are doing something relatively exceptional. Let's make it 
> default once people start feeling more comfortable with that option. After 
> all, this has no effect on end users.

For the Kazakh and Tatar spellcheckers, Ilnar and Jonatan might be able
to do this -- if you can explain exactly what documentation and support
would entail. But in general it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem,
as without builds that enable voikko+hfst+libreoffice-voikko in Windows
and without easily installable packages we are unlikely to get many
downstream users.

Fran