Re: system-wide location for dictionary files and dictionary file name format

Thanks, slacka.

> To answer your first and third question, we use hunspell not myspell. 

Ok. I knew that hunspell was used, but was not sure about the location
LO looks in for dictionary files. /usr/share/hunspell contains the spell
checking dictionaries and these are linked to from /usr/share/myspell
and similarly for thesauri (/usr/share/mythes) and hyphenation files
(/usr/share/hyphen), so I guess LO also looks in /usr/share/mythes and
/usr/share/hyphen.

> For the spellcheck function to work, LibreOffice requires both the main hunspell
> package along with a language dictionary (hunspell-en for English,
> hunspell-de for German, etc).

Hunspell is covered; I'm focusing on dictionary files (spelling,
thesaurus, hyphenation). Let's consider the French dictionaries from
their source <http://www.dicollecte.org/>. These contain fr-classique,
fr-moderne, fr-toutesvariantes, and fr-reforme1990 spelling
dictionaries. These are installed in /usr/share/hunspell and picked up,
e.g., by Firefox. However, LO does not pick them up, apparently because
their filenames are not of the form xx_YY, but of the form xx-zzzz. The
oxt file distributed by dicollecte contains a dictionaries.xcu file and
a Python script that deals with this when installed by the user, so not
system-wide. What I want to achieve is that the xcu file and other
relevant files are installed system-wide in such a way that LO picks
them up and things work the same way as if the oxt file was installed
per-user. *Where should I put those files?*

> For a package maintainer, your main concern should be that the language dictionary
> associated with the user’s locales is installed.  

Well, in Gentoo it is not done that way, but that is not too important
here. (This is reasonable: for example, I don't have French
locatlizations installed, but do write French texts from time to time.
In short: dictionaries should not be too tightly coupled to locales.)


Best,

Erik