To:
kurt@roeckx.be (Kurt Roeckx)
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Kurt,
On Wednesday, July 16, 2025 11:19:53 PM Mountain Standard Time Kurt Roeckx wrote:
On July 17, 2025 12:51:00 AM GMT+02:00, Soren Stoutner <soren@debian.org>
wrote:
Because I do realize that this is a non-trivial change to LibreOffice, I am >shipping nl_NL.dic for now, which all Dutch speakers can use for spell >checking.
I disagree. I think not shipping nl_BE is an RC bug. If you don't fix it, I will upload it myself.
First, I should note that the above email I am replying to was sent by Kurt to the bug email address, as well as to myself directly. It does not currently appear on the bug interface, although I read on debian-private today that the BTS was experiencing some load issues related to scraping that either delayed or deleted some emails. I am quoting the text above because Kurt obviously intended it to be included in bug history.
Based on this discussion on this thread, it has become apparent that this is a problem with both LibreOffice and Thunderbird. This provides an interesting scenario, as these two programs are probably the primary consumers of the Hunspell dictionaries on Debian. So, their behavior results in a de-facto standard for how things are done.
I feel that the current behavior is incorrect and should be considered a bug. Other people either seem to feel that the behavior is correct or that, even if it is a bug, it is not important enough to be changed.
Given the ramifications for users, I feel it is important that the Hunspell packages shipped in Debian work with LibreOffice and Thunderbird, even if the behavior of those packages is not in conformance with any actual standard or how language codes are treated in general by other programs.
If LibreOffice and Thunderbird were interested in working towards a correct use of the language codes, I would be willing to maintain the previous behavior, including shipping as many inaccurate country symlinks as necessary, until the changes could be implemented. But, personally, I do not want to have my name associated with a package that intends to ship these inaccurate symlinks in perpetuity.
As such, I think the best way forward is probably for Kurt to upload the changes he proposes. When doing so, please remove my name from the Maintainer field.
It should be noted that the Dutch package has some significant issues that I intended to address when I salvaged it, but were not appropriate to address before the freeze. These changes exist in experimental for dutch and in the new hunspell-nl source package in the NEW queue. Because they are significant, I intended to discuss them via email before they entered unstable. The email, which I had previously written and intended to send out after the trixie release, is attached. As the new maintainer of the package, you can decide how you want to deal with these issues and if you want to use the work on these two packages currently in experimental or if you would like to go a different direction.
The other thing that should be noted is that there are at least three other Hunspell packages affected by this same issue:
hunspell-ar
hunspell-bo
hunspell-dz
There is already an existing bug report discussing hunspell-ar that is worth reviewing:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1109305
The other two dictionaries also have bugs, already closed, but those do not contain any important information not already discussed here.
In all those cases, please feel free to upload whatever changes you feel are appropriate as long as you remove me as the Maintainer.
--
Soren Stoutner
soren@debian.org
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To:
debian-l10n-dutch@lists.debian.org,
Debian Install System Team <
debian-boot@lists.debian.org>,
nicoo <
nicoo@debian.org>
CC: Manuel Guerra <
ar.manuelguerra@gmail.com>
Subject: Intention to drop aspell-nl and idutch binary packages
TL;DR
-----
There is no DFSG-free source available to produce the aspell-nl and
idutch binary packages. Unless a DFSG-free source can be identified, they will be removed from Debian.
Background
----------
Recently, Manuel Guerra and I salvaged the dutch source package, which produces the hunspell-nl, wdutch, aspell-nl, and idutch binary packages. Our primary motivation was to update hunspell-nl to ship a .bdic binary dictionary compatible with Qt WebEngine used by various browsers in Debian including Privacy B