On 05/24/2008 12:04 PM, Ville-Pekka Vainio wrote:
The Voikko project initially started as the hunspell-fi project, but
hunspell
was dropped for now, because using malaga
<
http://home.arcor.de/bjoern-beutel/malaga/> gives better results with the
Finnish language. If you're interested, please read
<
http://voikko.sourceforge.net/architecture.html>.
Actually, that page says the malaga backend is worse than hunspell,
lacking important items such as threadsafety and does not perform well
in comparison. We already have a backend which we deem to be the right
backend and it would be great if work could be moved there to help get
hunspell in order.
One big decision maker was
also the fact that someone called Hannu Väisänen maintains a big Finnish
vocabulary known upstream as suomi-malaga, in Fedora packaged as
malaga-suomi-voikko. This, as the name suggests, requires using malaga.
Right, this is the only reason that I can tell for using malaga.
Someone did the work for malaga, but not for hunspell.
Voikko gives excellent results with the Finnish language currently,
much
better than any other free software implementations (myspell/ispell/aspell
and hunspell, whose upstreams are practically non-existent currently). In my
opinion Voikko is now working at least as well as the only proprietary
Finnish spell checker for Linux I know, Soikko. So it's pretty much the best
you can get.
Don't confuse the dictionary with the backend. So far I haven't seen a
reason why the hunspell backend couldn't support Finnish as well as
malaga if people would simply work on a dictionary for that backend
instead. I think it is important to note our strong desire for making it
work with hunspell. We went through great lengths to make hunspell THE
dictionary. See
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary which this
would now regress.