[libvoikko] hfst-ospell and Windows

[Harri Pitkänen]

Has anyone tried to build hfst-ospell for Windows?

I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how easy it would be to build a 
self contained version of libvoikko.dll for Windows with support for zhfst 
spellers. As you may know libvoikko without zhfst only depends on standard 
libraries (STL and compiler support library).

If we want to support zhfst spellers we need to build the following additional 
libraries:

 * zhfst-ospell
   * libarchive
   * libxml++
     * libxml2
     * libglibmm
       * libglib2
       * libsigc++
         * libffi

Not the most convinient thing to do considering that we want to statically 
link the standard libraries everywhere which most likely is not directly 
supported by the build systems.

Then I found TinyXML2: http://www.grinninglizard.com/tinyxml2/
It might be used as a replacement for libxml++ and would kill the need for all 
its dependencies, reducing the above list of dependencies from 8 to only 3 
libraries.

At the moment I don't have time to build all 8 libraries for Windows or port 
zhfst-ospell to use TinyXML. So for now this is all just theory. But if 
someone is interested in working on this, let me know. I'm planning a new 
binary release of libreoffice-voikko for Windows by the end of July and would 
be happy to have it zhfst-enabled if there is interest for such thing.

Harri