Hi all,

Welcome to the latest news related to the dict-common project for 
Debian. This project has to do with policy and common support for 
ispell dictionaries and wordlists in Debian. 

First of all let you know that the project has been announced in 
June 18th, 2002 edition of Debian Weekly News.

Regarding real news, we have very good news for this mail:

- On the one hand, we are pleased to announce a further step in the 
  dictionaries-common project: We now have at the sourceforge 
  staging area ports to the new system of all ispell dictionaries 
  and wordlists currently in Debian!

- On the other hand, we have a nice latest new: policy now covers 
  compatibility with pspell-ispell modules (as of 0.6.0). That means 
  that e.g. abiword now works properly with the ispell dictionaries 
  following this new policy.

This means that we can make a full testing of the whole system to 
debug for major problems. So, please, test and test. It is our point 
of view that minor problems can be debugged in the official Debian 
repository after the transition has been carried out. 

This brings us to the need for a deadline. Our initial candidate for 
a deadline was the end of this month, but real life, work on 
integration of pspell support and building of the remaining packages 
has taken a bit more than expected. This has probably made this 
deadline too short. If we move the deadline to some week in July we 
have the problem that August is coming and that in that month many 
of us will be unavailable. So seems more reasonable to set the 
deadline in the first days of September unless you really want the 
transition to be done right now (that is, in a couple of weeks). In 
any case please let us know what do you think about this.

One important thing: we are trying to do our best to keep in sync 
packages in the sourceforge staging area with packages in Debian 
unstable. But remember that both systems are no longer compatible, 
so please do not upload any old style ispell dictionary or wordlist 
packages to Debian in the meantime. That will confuse the transition. 
If you really have to do it, drop us an email first. That way the 
version in the Conflicts line of dictionaries-common can be changed 
in time and your new package will not break anything. A new policy 
package in sync with the official one (and a higher version) should 
then be put at the sourceforge staging area.

Since the migration needs to be done in a highly coordinated way to 
have it done in the minimum possible period of time after the deadline, 
we need to know which are your plans with respect to it. Note that 
after the new ispell and dictionaries-common are uploaded to Debian 
all previous ispell dictionaries and wordlists will become 
uninstallable.

So, please let us know what you do prefer. In any case, please contact 
us through the dict-common-dev mailing list, so we know you are not MIA.

If you are still not subscribed to the dict-common-dev mailing list at 
sourceforge, that is the best way to get in touch with us and discuss 
the final details of the transition.

Remember that the project page is at:

http://dict-common.sourceforge.net/

Your dictionaries-common team:

Rafael Laboissière,
David Coe,
Agustín Martín Domingo