On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 04:57:37PM -0500, oth...@freeshell.org wrote:

All the processes are idle, so it's not really an issue.

There is (intentionally) a persistent pool of sqwebmaild processes; you can change the SQWEBMAIL_PREFORK setting in the sqwebmaild config file if you want to change the number of processes.

The ispell processes, however, should not be sitting around. Perhaps sqwebmaild forgot to close its end of the pipes (when they tried to write, they should have got a SIGPIPE signal). Or perhaps it doesn't leave the signal handlers in the correct state when it exec's ispell.

Sam?

Now we have 'account options', I think that would be a better place to put this feature: e.g.

OPTIONS=ispelldict=svenska

which would pass "-d svenska" to the ispell command line.

However, you do realise that sqwebmail already has the ability to work in multiple languages, and that each language template directory has a pointer to the corresponding ispell dictionary name? See sqwebmail/html/README_LANG.txt in the sqwebmail source.

Now, the choice of language here is given by the language which the user has set in their browser; and it also depends on you having installed templates for that language.

I can see a clear argument that individual users may wish to override (1) the language which sqwebmail uses for its user interface; and also (2) the language which ispell uses for checking

(e.g. if you prefer to use sqwebmail in English mode, but you are writing a letter in German). Also, sqwebmail may not have templates installed for a particular language, but you might still want to perform spell-checking for a message you are writing in that language.

In that case, I think what is needed rather than a fixed ispell language per user, is the ability to select the ispell language from a drop-down list in the message composition screen.

Do you think that makes more sense?

Does anyone know if there is a flag to ispell which will cause it to list all the available languages? If not, then perhaps the ISPELLDICT config file should simple list multiple values to allow sqwebmail to generate a drop-down menu. This wouldn't be too hard to add. (And I guess the default should be stored as a user preference).

However, I do think there's a more fundamental piece of work which now needs to be done to sqwebmail. That is, to separate out: 1. Language strings 2. HTML Templates 3. Code

At the moment, the language strings are buried in the templates: for example things like

[#$FOLDERTITLE=Folder - #]

However this means that maintaining translations is a real pain, because on each release the language strings have to be individually merged back into the new template released by Sam.

In an ideal world,

* Sam would release a new version of sqwebmail, together with one set of language strings (in English), and one or two sets of templates (perhaps one which is pure CSS, and one which is designed to be compatible with pre-CSS browsers)

* Existing translations will continue to work. If Sam has added any new text messages, then they will be displayed in English until the translator for that language catches up

* Anyone who is maintaining their own set of templates for sqwebmail for a different look-and-feel can then release a new set to match the new version. All HTML will be in the templates. It would be great if the templating was flexible enough so that you could give a substatially different look to sqwebmail - e.g. combined folder and message view.

* As a nice bonus, login.html / expired.html / invalid.html would become the same page, but substituting in a different language string message. That makes it easier again for people customising pages.

Regards,

Brian.