[libvoikko] libvoikko 4.0, voikko-fi 2.0 and libreoffice-voikko 5.0

[Sjur Moshagen]

2015 juov 15 kl. 16:54 skrev Harri Pitkänen <hatapitk at iki.fi>:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> On Tuesday 15 December 2015 12:35:54 Sjur Moshagen wrote:
>> One issue I noticed today:
>> 
>> Is it so that libvoikko will now build with no default dictionary search
>> paths? Ie one must specify at compile time all search paths? That seems a
>> bit odd. Here is one example:
> 
> Yes, this is intentional and was done to resolve this bug:
> 
>  https://github.com/voikko/corevoikko/issues/13
> 
>> That is, after upgrading to libvoikko 4.0, I do not see any spelling
>> dictionaries unless I specify the search dir with -p. This was not the case
>> earlier.
> 
> The release notes mention that you should now build with option --with-
> dictionary-path=... on system where it remains to be useful (Linux and OS X).
> 
> And even then it is good to consider all three points Tino mentioned in the 
> bug report above. Especially now that we don't enable any platform dependent 
> formats by default it might make more sense to use "share" instead of "lib" if 
> you don't have to consider backwards compatibility.

This is all fine except for one major drawback: you can’t install multiple languages.

Until now, the solution to multiple languages was to install more dictionary files in one of the dictionary search path locations. With this change, that is not possible any longer. The problem is, you can’t run several instances of libvoikko and derived tools at the same time:

* MozVoikko: install one, then another - the second installation will replace the first one, Firefox crashes upon restart
* LO-Voikko: install one, then another - the second installation will replace the first one, works fine with the last installed language
* MacVoikko: install multiple ones: behavior undefined, seems to work, but the following worrying message is logged:

2015-12-16 10:08:40,651 MacVoikko[25031]: Unable to register any languages for MacVoikko spell checker

(after all languages are registered)

That is, the above change is from a user point of view a regression (not on Windows, since it wasn’t actually working in the first place). I would strongly argue that the change should be reversed until we have a working solution for multilingual users, even when the old behavior is not optimal. At least it works for some.

The exact location is not a major issue for me, but the ability to find additional dictionary files is.

The only working solution as the code is now is to prepackage all language combinations as separate extensions/plugins, which is obviously not an optimal solution, given that there are quite a few languages used for spelling in the Apertium and Giella infrastructures (which both rely on libvoikko for some or all of their speller features).

Sjur