On Tue, 2015 Feb 24 20:45+0100, Agustin Martin wrote: > > It is intended for internal use, not for general use. I think it > should simply speak about default value and comment how to change it.
Yes, that would have been helpful for me. > > > 1) Once new wordlist is installed, call `select-default- > > > wordlist' as root and select the new value. > > > > This does not appear to be scriptable, however. And isn't this the > > same as "dpkg-reconfigure dictionaries-common", going through > > debconf? > > Both lead to the same result, as well as reconfiguring any wordlist. It's a bit misleading; it gives the appearance that debconf is all there is to it. So debconf was indeed used exclusively at one time, and that eventually proved insufficient? Out of curiosity, too: Would update-alternatives ever have been able to handle the system words/ispell files? The dictionaries-common mechanism always seemed to me like a quasi-reimplementation of that infrastructure, but that is a layperson's view. > Note that your pre-seeding procedure will not work for anything > involving a shared question with a backup of the default value stored > somewhere unless special care has been taken about this. It should > however work if no backup copy is stored. I've only had trouble if the thing I'm pre-seeding is already installed, so this is another instance of that. There's grub-pc, and in some cases apparmor... but then, I just add the appropriate actions to my script. (That said, the appropriate actions are not always obvious...) > I am not inclined to have a non valid value in wordlist-default, even > if temporarily. > > I am however starting to think about something like > > # update-default-wordlist --set-regexp-default="string" > > that tries to match "string" to available values and if a single match > is found set it as default, failing loudly otherwise. This would be > scriptable and has IMHO the best of both worlds. "string" could be > "webster" or even "english" if only a leading match is considered, but > I'd prefer something more general, or at least having something more > general as fallback. I think this is a sensible solution. Regexps are often overkill, but given the relatively verbose strings that need to be matched, this is a glove that fits. As a complement to that, how about an option to print the list of available words/ispell choices (i.e. the same lists shown in the debconf dialogs), one per line, so that a script can grab those? Doing this would otherwise require peeking into /var. > Current design has a number of known flaws. I comes from a time when > debconf was more limited and UTF-8 was not properly available. I would > have designed things differently now (something locale+variant based > would have been way simpler, but people wanted to preserve original > package names and allow for inclusion of more than one wordlist in a > package, and I was just arrived to Debian), but changing things now is > just too noisy unless a lot of work is put in this, and IMHO it does > clearly not worth. Yes, I know what that's like. I don't need the whole thing changed out, but it would be nice if the tools made it easier to manage. > Let me think about the --set-regexp-default or a similar approach. > That might be very interesting. Indeed! I look forward to this sort of feature :) Thank you for your consideration, --Daniel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
