Subject: bug#17742: Acknowledgement (Support for enchant?)

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2016 17:40:52 +0200

> From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
> Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2016 22:04:55 +0000
> Cc: [email-masked]
> 
> 1. Assuming my patches to enchant are accepted sooner rather than later, and there's a minor Enchant release soon, then accept an initial implementation of Enchant support in Emacs with a fixed casechars value. This is no worse than for Aspell.
> 
> 1a. If someone wants to add a way for Emacs to parse hunspell dictionaries when used via Enchant, that's fine by me as a temporary workaround.
> 
> 2. When hunspell 2 is released, hopefully there will be an official channel for Emacs to get this information. Any workaround introduced as per 1a above would now be more solid.
> 
> 3. Once one of Enchant's supported engines has an official way to get this information, then it's a good time to add an API to Enchant too (and support in the standalone binary).
> 
> Overall, there's no hurry. We have precise casechars for hunspell dictionaries today (though as I mentioned elsewhere, there may still be problems with using them). Enchant support for now is useful for the spelling checkers it supports that Emacs does not; obviously, Emacs's direct hunspell support is better for now than via Enchant. It would be nice to fix that eventually and use only Enchant, but there's no need to rush.

For someone who would like to use Enchant with Hunspell as its engine,
this sounds sub-optimal to me, if 1a is not implemented as part of the
initial Enchant support, or at all.  How will we be able in good faith
to advertise support for a new speller when in fact it degrades, even
if slightly, the direct interface with that very engine?