[aspell-devel] Re: [LOCALE] Building Aspell on Red Hat Linux 9

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Lars Aronsson wrote:

> A friend tried to build Aspell's Swedish dictionary (aspell-sv-1.3.8)
> on Red Hat Linux 9.  Apparently, this Linux distribution sets
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8 by default and the dictionary is written in
> ISO8859-1.  This is what happened:
>
> aspell-sv-1.3.8> make all
> ./unsq < words-sv.sq | aspell --local-data-dir=./ --lang=svenska
> create master ./svenska
> Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected end of string) at ./unsq line
> 51, <stdin> line 7.
[...]

> The matter here is not en_US or sv_SE, but the fact that
> some ISO8859-1 characters are interpreted as prefixes for
> UTF-8 two byte sequences.  I think the Makefile should
> explicitly set the LANG and/or LC_CTYPE environment
> variables before running "unsq" and "aspell".

This will happen from next time I package a version of
"aspell-sv".

> Is there an official Aspell policy to move to UTF-8?

Don't know.  But Aspell already demands that a dictionary
contains information on which character encoding is used for
it.

> Does the Swedish/Danish dictionary team at SSLUG any
> decision on this?

Not really.  But we have considered to switch from
ISO-8859-1 to ISO-10646/UTF-8.

Jacob
-- 
"Human beings just can't not communicate."