Subject: Re: PATCH: Compilation with LIBXML2 was broken
From: Vlad Harchev (hvv@hippo.ru)
Date: Mon Feb 05 2001 - 12:21:50 CST
On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Sam TH wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 12:11:02PM -0500, Thomas Fletcher wrote:
[...]
> There are a few issues here:
>
> 1) expat vs libxml
>
> Expat is smaller, probably faster, and more portable. However, lots
> of people already have libxml on their systems. libxml also provides
> lots more features, but we currently don't use any of them.
Once of the nice features of libxml is that it supports any encoding that is
supported by iconv it's linked with. It's rather vital for non-latin1 locales.
So don't stick to libxml completely please.
> The real problem here is that the SAX API was never standardized for
> C. Durn Java folks.
>
> But it's unlikely that any of the above facts are going to change. So
> I think we are stuck with the libxml/expat split. However, When I
> Finish Autoconf(tm), we will be able to autodetect them. No more
> nasty options.
>
> 2) ispell vs aspell
>
> Ispell sucks. The api is horrible, the code is old, unmaintained, and
> slow. It supports no interesting features. But it has a large
> installed base, and lots of hash files. Also, pspell and aspell
> haven't been ported to all of our platforms.
Ispell supports suffix compression unlike pspell. This is critical for
languages that use suffixation very intensively (all slavic languages do).
Hashes for pspell for russian are very huge (I don't remember exactly - but
of the order of 50 Mb vs 7 Mb for ispell). So please don't dump ispell support
completely. That's why pspell dictionaries are available only for latin-based
languages.
Best regards,
-Vlad
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