Re: Using Enchant in LyX

Dominic Lachowicz wrote:
>> - last but not least: would you consider moving away from glib and use
>> equivalent C++ feature instead? If yes, I guess I could help a bit.
>>
>
> On Enchant's web page, I mention that the Glib dependency is a
> pragmatic one and that I'd be amenable to someone replacing it if they
> were really scared of it.
>

Sorry, I guess I over read that part.
 
> That said:
>
> 1) Enchant uses a lot more than the "equivalent C++ features" of Glib
> (character set conversion, DLL loading, path manipulation,
> unicode-aware filename handling, ...)
>

OK, forget about about it. I thought it was just string manipulation.
WRT unicode, I naively thought that passing strings as utf8 was all that
was needed and the spell-checking engine will do the rest.

> 2) Glib is maintained, portable, a growing dependency for lots of
> things (like Qt),

Well Qt only use the event loop AFAIK but OK, I agree :-)

> and has pre-compiled packages for the major
> platforms (any Linux distro does it themselves; Fink on OSX; and GTK+
> provides packages for Win32)
> 3) Everything "just works" right now. I'm hesitant to introduce
> potentially destabilizing changes in the name of removing a single
> dependency.
>

Fair enough.

>
>> I must say I am a bit reluctant to do the compilation myself as this is
>> going to mean a glib headache apparently. We already compile iconv and intl
>> ourselves but glib looks like a beast :-) I may be wrong...
>>
>
> The GTK+ Win32 packages have Glib DLLs. They work great.
>
OK, I'll try but I fear that we'll have to recompile it anyway with
MSVC2008 in order to not have to distribute legacy MS dlls. I guess I
will pass this task to our Windows packagers :-)

> Also, recent versions of Glib have lost their iconv dependency while
> preserving the functionality. They implement the iconv APIs in terms
> of builtin Win32 WideChar APIs.
>
I've read that yes. I was thinking of doing the same for LyX actually
but this is not a top priority.

Abdel.
Received on Wed Jun 4 17:12:28 2008