[needs-packaging] enchant 1.6.0 outdated, pipe command '*' (save personal dictionary) does nothing

[Juha Jeronen]

[needs-packaging] enchant

enchant is a meta-spellchecker supporting multiple spellchecking backends (hunspell, GNU aspell, hspell, Voikko, Zemberek, Apple Spell (on Mac OS)), with an ispell-compatible pipe mode for use within applications.

URL: https://github.com/AbiWord/enchant
License: LGPL 2.1
Notes: Enchant homepage has moved to GitHub. The old homepage at abisource.com was last updated in 2010.

The build steps for a released version seem standard; for details, see e.g. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/enchant.html

Ubuntu currently has a package for enchant 1.6.0, but it is seriously out of date (2010); latest release is 2.2.3 (2018).

Why this is important:

Enchant is the recommended interface for Voikko, the spellchecker for Finnish. The older tmispell interface (that comes with Voikko) is deprecated by the developers of Voikko, so Enchant is currently the only supported option for checking both Finnish and English using the same frontend. A common frontend is important for easy switching of spellcheck language within applications such as Emacs and LyX.

Finnish is an agglutinative language. This prevents common spellcheckers such as aspell from working properly, so Voikko itself is really necessary.

The old version lacks support for the '*' command in pipe mode, so it is unable to update the personal dictionary. This is important especially in Emacs, because Emacs's flyspell (on-the-fly spell checker) package uses the pipe mode and sends this command to save new words into the personal dictionary.

With Enchant 2.2.3, this works properly. (Does not even need configuration in Emacs other than telling it to use enchant as "the ispell program"; Enchant itself knows where its personal dictionaries are (~/.config/enchant), as well as which file to use for each language.)

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

*** This is an automated message ***

This bug is tagged needs-packaging which identifies it as a request for a new package in Ubuntu. As a part of the managing needs-packaging bug reports specification, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Specs/NeedsPackagingBugs, all needs-packaging bug reports have Wishlist importance. Subsequently, I'm setting this bug's status to Wishlist.

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

Enchant 2 is now in Ubuntu 20.04: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/enchant-2

It's also installed as default. Finnish support libenchant-2-voikko is going to be installed by default from tomorrow onwards (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/language-selector/0.201).