In a few weeks, on the weekend of July 13 and 14, the annual pkgsrc conference, pkgsrcCon 2019, will take place in Cambridge, UK. Whether you are a user or developer of pkgsrc, this is a really nice place to meet the developers and spend some time hacking together and listening to talks.

My talk this year was originally supposed to be about Go module support in pkgsrc, but that work did not get done in time. So instead, I will talk about something entirely different:

A Tale of Two Spellcheckers

This talk is about the obscure and intricate world of spell checkers and how they are packaged in pkgsrc, the NetBSD package collection.

There are many general-purpose spell checkers in existence. ispell and aspell are the most famous ones, but hunspell, originally written for Hungarian, has become the spell checker of choice. In addition, there are a number of specialized checkers tailored to the idiosyncrasies of a single language, e.g. voikko (Finnish) and zemberek (Turkish).

There is a separate library, called Enchant, that aims to abstract away the spell checker implementation from the application code. Enchant went through a botched transition of major versions, from V1 to V2. To this day, most apps only support V1. We’ll talk about general lessons from this case.