please downgrade 'mozvoikko' to Recommends

[Martin-Éric Racine]

Binary package hint: language-support-writing-fi

language-support-writing-fi's explicit Depends upon mozvoikko has the consequence of, in turn, imposing a dependency on Firefox. In cases where the user wishes to purge Firefox from their system, the unfortunate consequence is to completely lose spell checking capabilities on their system. Thus, would it be possible to downgrade 'mozvoikko' to Recommends? APT and Aptitude will normally pull all Recommends, so this should still accomplish the desired effect of pulling the package by default on a fresh install, all while allowing users who do not wish to have Firefox wasting space on their hard-disk to retain their spell checking software for Finnish.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Aug 6 12:22:20 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: language-support-writing-fi (not installed)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=fi_FI:fi:en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.28-14.47-generic
SourcePackage: language-support-writing-fi
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-14-generic i586

[Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk)]

As suggested by Martin Pitt, I'm hereby polling the opinion of Arne Goetje on this issue.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

Am I right with the assumption that mozvoikko is only good to use for mozilla products? Or is it used anywhere else on the system? Would libvoikko1 and voikko-fi be sufficient to provide spellchecking in other applications?

[Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk)]

That is correct: mozvoikko only supports Mozilla products.

voikko-fi is not a spell checker. It's only a morphologic description of Finnish. What you need to include are front-ends that interfacw with it, such as:

libenchant-voikko - Voikko spell-checker libenchant plugin
mozvoikko - Finnish spell-checker extension for Firefox
openoffice.org-voikko - Finnish language tools for OpenOffice.org
tmispell-voikko - Ispell wrapper which uses Voikko for spell-checking

IMHO, mozvoikko and openoffice.org-voikko should both go to Recommends, because they both Depends upon fairly sizable packages (Firefox and OOo, respectively), for which alternatives exist that would instead use e.g. libenchant-voikko to interface to Voikko. tmispell-voikko is somewhat deprecated, but could go to Recommends as well.

The only goal of this request to downgrade mozvoikko is to avoid pulling Firefox as an indirect dependency. However, since Firefox is the default browser on Ubuntu, it makes sense to at least keep mozvoikko as Recommends.

PS: I'm often on Freenode as Q-FUNK if you need to discuss this in more details.

[Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk)]

Could we please get around completing this one, before the Feature Freeze starts? Thanks!

[Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk)]

Here's a patch on debian/control that accomplishes the desired changes.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Martin-Éric Racine [2009-08-27 14:55 -0000]:
> Here's a patch on debian/control that accomplishes the desired changes.

Please note that these packages are autobuilt, so manual patches won't
work.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

Martin Pitt wrote:
> Martin-Éric Racine [2009-08-27 14:55 -0000]:
>> Here's a patch on debian/control that accomplishes the desired changes.
>
> Please note that these packages are autobuilt, so manual patches won't
> work.
>

I will remove mozvoikko and openoffice.org-voikko from the
language-support-writing-fi package and add them to language-selector,
so they only get installed for users how install FI language support and
have firefox|thinderbird|seamonkey|epiphany installed already (for
mozvoikko) and oo.o-core for oo.o-voikko respectively.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

in my bzr branch lp:~arnegoetje/language-selector/language-selector-karmic

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

I believe this has been fixed in version 0.4.7, 0.4.8 got uploaded into the archive.

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

Please see bug #423048. ooo-voikko and mozvoikko are currently not getting installed when installing Ubuntu. Should the installer be now changed to install those manually by default, or should the Recommends be used instead of completely removing the dependencies?

Requiring all users to (know to) launch language-selector to install critical features (Finnish spell-checking in OOo is probably the most used software for spell-checking needs) is not IMHO an option, and a regression from jaunty.

[Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk)]

Timo, I fully agree with your assessment and that's why my initial request was to simply downgrade mozvoikko and ooo-voikko to Recommends, but I'm told that all language writing aids packages are automatically built and, as such, either we depend upon something or we don't. As an alternate solution, Arne suggested making it a special case for the language pack installer, which allows defining arbitrary dependencies on a per-language basis.

Arne, am I correct in assuming that you use 'germinate' to seed your package dependencies? If yes, then it should be possible to perform what was initially asked by dividing seeds into Depends and Recommends items. For instance, ubuntu-meta does this rather well.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> Timo, I fully agree with your assessment and that's why my initial
> request was to simply downgrade mozvoikko and ooo-voikko to Recommends,
> but I'm told that all language writing aids packages are automatically
> built and, as such, either we depend upon something or we don't. As an
> alternate solution, Arne suggested making it a special case for the
> language pack installer, which allows defining arbitrary dependencies on
> a per-language basis.
>
> Arne, am I correct in assuming that you use 'germinate' to seed your
> package dependencies? If yes, then it should be possible to perform what
> was initially asked by dividing seeds into Depends and Recommends items.
> For instance, ubuntu-meta does this rather well.
>

no, we don't use germinate for language-support packages. They are built
with langpack-o-matic.

Putting the depends in language-selector was only the first step. Now
all packages, which have such additional translation or writing aids
need to be changed to include a hook in the postinst script to call
language-selector and pull the necessary packages depending on which
language(s) the user has installed. I know this is messy and will
require user interaction (right now we can only display a notification
window and the user needs to click on a button to launch
language-selector), but it's the best we can do right now. The
debian/ubuntu packaging system unfortunately is a bit limited in this
regard.

BTW: Recommends: are also pulled automatically nowadays, so that
wouldn't solve the problem. A Recommends: mozvoikko in the
language-support-writing-fi package would still be installed by default
and would pull whatever dependencies it has.

[Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk)]

The Debian/Ubuntu packaging system is not limited at all. That's what Recommends are for. :)

Rather, the limitation seems to be in langpack-o-matic, which is apparently incapable of producing binary control files with package relationships other than Depends.

Recommends can be skipped using --without-recommends on Aptitude. They can also be removed afterwards without affecting the package that pulled them.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> The Debian/Ubuntu packaging system is not limited at all. That's what
> Recommends are for. :)
>
> Rather, the limitation seems to be in langpack-o-matic, which is
> apparently incapable of producing binary control files with package
> relationships other than Depends.

Well, we could do it if we hack it in on a case by case basis, but
that's messy.

> Recommends can be skipped using --without-recommends on Aptitude. They
> can also be removed afterwards without affecting the package that pulled
> them.

1. the default package manager on Ubuntu is synaptic, on Kubuntu it
would be kpackagekit (or whatever that application is called now), not
aptitude.
2. the average user who installs Finnish language support uses either
language-selector (which calls synaptic or kpackagekit) or chooses
Finnish language on installation time. In both cases Recommends: will be
pulled automatically.
3. Asking the user to manually remove the packages does not sound user
friendly to me.
4. the limitation in the debian/ubuntu packaging system I was referring
to can be described as: it is currently not possible to pull a package
in if multiple conditions apply, i.e. language-support-writing-fi pulls
mozvoikko, but only if one of the mozilla related packages is already
installed or is going to be installed. This logic is currently not
possible, but would be needed for our cases, not only for
mozvoikko/oo.o-voikko, but also for additional translation packages,
which cannot be shipped in language-packs at the moment (e.g.
thunderbird-locale-*, gnome-doc-*, kde-l10n-*, ...).
Users have complained before that we pull in applications like
thunderbird by default, because the language-support-translation-*
packages depend on them... this still would happen with Recommends:, so
this is not the solution.
Therefor the workaround in language-selector which gives us exactly the
needed functionality.
But of course it would be nicer to have a logic in the package manager,
that if you install thunderbird and you have language-packs for
languages foo, bar and baz installed, that the corresponding
thunderbird-locale-* packages get installed also. Who knows, maybe we
will get there in future... :)

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

I think the major point of complaints has been by those using regular Ubuntu but wanting to get rid of particular package, not by those using Lubuntu or such which doesn't come with OpenOffice.org et al. installed. Recommends would solve that without causing regressions. I agree that there is also the group of people needing more minimal installations out-of-the-box, but they are not the majority of Ubuntu users which use the major flavors.

My guesstimate based on previous experiences is that having to click a notification will be missed by ca. 50% of ordinary Ubuntu users. 5% of those 50% will come to Ubuntu Finland's forums and get the info how to get spellcheck working. The rest will either accept that "ok, Ubuntu does not have Finnish spellchecking" or complain around how Ubuntu is not that good for average user. I don't want to exaggerate, but something like this it seems to always go when everything is not done automatically for the user. The notifications nowadays are a bit better than the light bulb in the old days, but they still don't last that long, are only shown once (, are often without translations) etc.

(btw, I cannot test any language-selector functionality currently either because it crashes on launch, bug/trace #427716)