oth...@freeshell.org writes:

But I didn't build ispell using pkgsrc, I took what Red Hat gave me.

Which is a little silly. Man pages and info pages are the basic help tools.

I skimmed through the manual and missed that. It's there if you dig for it. And although it appears to claim that the pwli file is named for the LANG tag, LANG tags are supposed to be of the form en-US but you will actually get en-american in the name of the pwli file.

I thought you were offering to do it. Did I misunderstand you or did you mean that you were offering to write documentation that wouldn't be of use to the people who actually need it?

I didn't say that. I was describing the ideal situation.

Now you're insisting that functionality has to be perfect before it can be added. That isn't the way open source works. You get it working on at least one platform, submit it, then wait for somebody to say it doesn't work on their platform and here's the fix.

From the changelog it appears that the cut-down list was an interim measure and that Sam never got around to generating a full list automatically.

Given the ability to support timezones the best solution is to automatically generate a list of all of them that can be stripped down if desired rather than to ship it with a very limited number and leave it to each and every person who requires a full list to compile all the information by hand or spend time writing a script to do it. Having a script that does it automatically means that you're less likely to say "this is too much work, let's go with Exchange instead."

Because nobody else had released a script like that and I needed one I wrote it. I then figured I ought to contribute a little back to sqwebmail by letting Sam include it. So I did, even though I knew there was a possibility I'd have to do further work on it so it would work on other systems. Perhaps if you said why it didn't work you'd find that the next version of it would work on your system.

I would expect new functionality like that would appear in a beta release intended for those who know that it might break on their system.

It wouldn't be hard for the script to drop in the current set of zones if it can't find the zoneinfo stuff. Not hard, but it might not be the right thing to do on a system where the info for those particular zones has not been installed.

Where did I ever say that? Of course those things don't have to be there. But until there is clear and full idiot-level documentation about how to work out which spelling package you have, what dictionaries you have, and how to add them, you can expect to see regular queries like "how do I add pt-BR dictionary." And until it can be automated, you will still see queries like that from people who don't read the documentation or think they're entitled to free consultancy work from the list. Writing such documentation ends up saving time in the long run.