310936 - Provide solutions for installing thunderbird dictionaries

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Oscar Manuel Gómez Senovilla]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; es-ES; rv:1.7.11) Gecko/20050729
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; es-ES; rv:1.7.11) Gecko/20050729

Most dictionaries can't be included in next thunderbird 1.5 localized installers
due to license restrictions, so let's provide solutions for the users can
install the dictionary of their language.

The better approach is to use the startpage.extra entity in start.dtd file, that
allows to show static text to the user. This is not bad, but since it's at the
bottom of the screen (if visible) the user might not see whatever the
localization team can have done. So, I suggest that on startup (and/or when
choosing to check the spelling of the text), thunderbird could check for the
existence of the ab-CD dictionary, and if it's not present, warn the user about
it and let him/her download and install it from an url provided in some entity.
Also, it would be good an option for overriding the check on startup, or
anywhere else this could make sense.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

I don't think we should limit this to just installing the dicitoinary of the current locale. It would be awesome to have a tool inside thunderbird that lists all available dictionaries and allows you to just check the ones you want to download. Checked dicitionaries would then be downloaded and installed automatically.

Many people out there are multilingual and always have to jump through hoops to get additional dictionaries. Would be nice if our products were the exception to that rule.

Not sure if this is best inside the preference dialog (where the current download link is now) or as a separate dialog. Would be great if there was an aditional item in the dropdown in the composition-window to access the tool though (that's the first place I always look).

Comment 2

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

Jonas, that sounds quite similar to the plans for a new stub installer for Firefox  2 (and presumably all toolkit apps). Whether this functionality would be available to an already installed app is an open question though. See this for more info: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307296#c8

Comment 3

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

No, not really. That one is more a tool that lets you choose which l10n of FF/TB to download and install. What I'm talking about is a tool that finds and downloads dictionary xpis.

Comment 4

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] - PTO until Nov 16]

Dictionaries are fully supported.