bug#44318: 28.0.50; Problem with ispell/flyspell and ""enchant"" backend

[Reuben Thomas]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2020 at 18:50, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> From: Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
> Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 18:27:32 +0000
> Cc: 44318@debbugs.gnu.org, dinkonin <dinkonin@gmail.com>
>
>  I think it would be wrong for Emacs to do that, as that would put all
>  the eggs in a single basket, something that is not safe in Free
>  Software world, where packages become unmaintained outside of our
>  control.
>
> I don't understand this: Emacs, to this day, is happy to import large quantities of code from other project; let
> alone the option of forking/maintaining free software, which is one of its great benefits. And because
> Enchant has such a similar interface to the other supported spell-checkers, the cost of switching is low. For
> myself, I'd be more concerned with bugs or missing functionality in Enchant as a reason to be cautious (i.e.
> I would want to see a phased transition) than about the long-term prospects.

We are miscommunicating.  My point is that if Emacs will depend on
Enchant and won't be able to use the existing spellers without Enchant
being in-between, then we will be in a dire situation if Enchant stops
being developed and bit-rots.  By contrast, with the current code, we
can always tell users to use aspell/hunspell directly.

What I was trying to say is that it would be very easy to re-add support for the other spell-checkers, since they and Enchant operate in the same way, and they would not have changed in the mean time. There is little to rot in Enchant, I intend to reduce that amount, and in the end it should be less effort to maintain Enchant than to maintain multiple back-ends in ispell.el.

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