Status of dict-freedict-*-* packages

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

Hello,

I found out that the Debian packages dict-freedict-*-* are orphaned
and I wanted to have a look at them because something might be done
better.  The problem is, that the download URL in debian/copyright
is wrong and you seem to have to download each single language pack
separately.  If you ask me I would prefer this and I would care only
for those languages I speek myself.  So I followed the links on
sourceforge which leaded me to http://www.freedict.de/ where all
these dictionaries from the freedict source package can be found
in single files with newer time stamps than the archives on sourceforge.

A more detailed research showed up the fact that all these archives
contain preprocessed dict-files which are "not really" *sources* in
the sense of the files you edit to fix bugs.  So I dived into the
description part of the german dictionary files which showed the
following string:

   27. Apr. 2000 Database was converted to TEI format and
   checked into CVS10.April 2000The Data was originally
   generated from Frank Richter's "ding" Database.It was
   converted to TEI format by Horst Eyermann. Phonetics was
   added throughtxt2pho (a TTS front end for the German
   inventories of the MBROLA project)Mr. Portele granted the
   right to distribute the result of the phoneticconversion
   within this project - thanks.

Regarding to the ding database:  It is inside Debian in the trans-de-en
package (Maintainer in CC).  So my suggestion is: Use the trans-de-en
package together with throughtxt2pho to build the dictd dictionary
from *real* source.  This would enable us to orphan the other dictd
dictionary which is based on the same source (Frank Richter's "ding"
database) - the dict-de-en package.  This package has some bugs
assigned which also have their trouble because of having no real
source.  The philosophy is to check out an online dictionary which
might be the most up to date version, but is dependend from a running
dictd server at package build time.  IMHO this is a bad approach.

I would like to hear your opinion about building one unified
dict-de-en package from the trans-de-en package and remove dict-de-en
as well as removing the dict-freedict-ger-eng package which would
be superflous in this case.

Perhaps some other people might dive into the other language packs
and perhaps this discussion is better in debian-devel to get a
wider audience.

Kind regards

          Andreas.