381860 - Finnish dictionary is incompatible with 64bit linux

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Extension Compatibility, defect)

Description

[Matti L]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.3 (Ubuntu-feisty)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.3 (Ubuntu-feisty)

When I try to install Finnish / Suomi dictionary I got a dialog box saying

Incompatible Extension: "Suomen kielen oikoluku" could not be installed because it is not compatible with your Firefox build type (Linux_x86_64-gcc3). Please contact the author of this item about the problem.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Goto Firefox add-ons / Dictonaries
2. Select Finnish / Suomi
3. Install
Actual Results:  
Installation cancelled becasuse of error.

Expected Results:  
Dictionary installed.

Comment 1

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

I don't think this is a bug in Firefox. The author of the extension includes myspell libraries for Linux_x86-gcc3 and Windows, so they limit the compatibility in install.rdf to the same platforms.

It would be interesting to know why they need do ship those libraries.

Comment 2

[Matti L]

I do have following (at least) myspell packages installed:
* libmyspell3c2 1:3.1-18build1
* myspell-fi 0.7-17build1

Comment 3

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

I'm pretty sure Firefox doesn't use system libraries at all and ships it's own myspell.so. Probably an old version too, which may be why these guys are shipping binary components.

Can you visit http://www.mozilla.fi/wiki/Suomen_kielen_oikoluku (which is in the install.rdf for the extension), and see if there is contact information. Please report back anything you find out.

Comment 4

[Matti L]

This extension is using its own library, because it adds support for two finnish dictionary applications.
Voikko is used in e.g. 
    * OpenOffice.org
    * Abiword
    * many KDE-desktop applications
    * Vim, Emacs and many other editors.
And then is Soikko, which doesn't fullfill Mozilla licence requirements but is freely available.

They (the owner of this problematic addon/dictionary) would gladly to use only Voikko, if someone would help them. Mac OS X support is missing too.

Oddity related to this dictionary:
* Because this dictionary comes with its own libraries, dictionary will work after two(!) restarts. [ I wonder what happens, if there is any other dictionary that have its own libraries too ... ]

No indication of owner of this dictionary. However, if help is offered, then contact information leads to finnish localization project at Mozilla
http://www.mozilla.fi/wiki/Suomennosprojekti, maybe Ville Pohjanheimo is the best first guess as contact person (for Firefox).

Comment 5

[Matti L]

There seems to be good reasons not to use myspell for finnish.

From author of Voikko (project sponsored by COSS 2006) http://www.hunspell-fi.org/kesakoodi-report.pdf

"I originally intended my work with Soikko integration be an one time con-
tribution, but things did not go as I planned. The code needed fixing, and soon
I started thinking about what would be needed to get a decent free replacement
for Soikko. I had not managed to actually do anything before I read about
Hunspell, a free spellchecker written to satisfy the needs of Hungarian language. Hunspell was an evolutionary improvement over Myspell (used at the time in OpenOffice.org), adding among other thing second level of affix stripping and some limited support for compound words, but otherwise retaining the original design of Myspell. This seemed ideal to me, as it fixed the worst problems that made Myspell unusable for Finnish. I started to write an experimental affix file (used in Hunspell to describe the morphology of a language) with very little knowledge of what I was supposed to do. For basic noun inflection things started quickly to look very good: it was not diffcult to exceed the quality of old Myspell implementation, but I had to exclude clitics, compounding, derivation and verbs from the initial implementation."

Comment 6

[Matti L]

One suggestion from author of Voikko (http://www.hunspell-fi.org/kesakoodi-report.pdf):
* Better integration of existing tools in free applications. A lot could be
done by using Enchant instead of some specific spellchecker backend.

Comment 7

[Matti L]

There seems to be two related bugs
366427 "Use enchant instead of myspell for spell checking"
319778 "Replace MySpell with HunSpell"

Comment 8

[Ville Pohjanheimo (inactive)]

C #3: The replacement myspell.so is there to provide support for the Soikko binary and enable usage of Voikko. It's the same version as in Mozilla CVS, but slightly extended (see below).

Bug 319778 in Comment 7 is not related as Hunspell compatibility wouldn't do the trick (see e.g. http://voikko.sourceforge.net/architecture.html and Malaga). Bug 364035 on the other hand is relevant (probably similar but more restricted than 366427) and done by Andris Pavenis who is also the man behind our myspell hack to get Soikko/Voikko working.

The patch for the changes to myspell.so is available on Andris' page at http://ap1.pp.fi/mozilla/mozilla+soikko.html (http://ap1.pp.fi/mozilla/xpi/1.8.1/myspell+voikko+soikko-20061007.diff - thought apparently the most recent version with some aesthetic changes is missing - Andris?)

With the patch it's possible to compile a myspell.so that it would support Voikko (and Soikko, thought Soikko is 32bit so unusable). If Voikko is available on 64bit Ubuntu then the extension should work with that.

Comment 9

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Confirming since this has an owner and is being worked on.

Comment 10

[Andris Pavenis]

Tried to look what I can do on 64 bit Linux (Fedora Core 7). Getting Voikko working was not a problem. When I made local copy of firefox-2.0.0.5 and replaced libmyspell.so with my version, then spellcheck worked. I did not succeed yet however to replace with one from locally installed extension. 

Much better way is a way which I proposed in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364035

In that patch (or similar) would be accepted, we would not need to replace Mozilla  shared libraries with our modified versions. Unfortunately it looks that a there is practically no hope of getting it through before release of 3.0.

Comment 11

[Andris Pavenis]

There will perhaps be no fix for Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0.0.X versions. As I mentioned above I had problems getting it to work reliably for these versions.

The situation is much better for upcoming major versions (Firefox-3.0, ...). My patch for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364035 is now applied, so no more ugly hacks as for 2.0.0.X are required. As result it is possible to mostly stay away from non-frozen interface (except spell-checker related ones).

Spell-check itself (using Voikko) is tested to work for me using recent CVS versions of Minefield (I tested patched 3.0a8pre, now building todays current CVS version) on Linux x86_64 (Fedora 7 distribution). 

Comment 12

[Andris Pavenis]

There is new extension for Firefox and Thunderbird trunk versions newer than September 20th, 2007 (whan patch for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364035 were applied). I myself have tested it for Linux_x86_64-gcc3, Linux_x86-gcc3 and WINNT_x86-msvc. Source code is added to Voikko project SVN in Sourceforge. Test versions are available from http://ap1.pp.fi/mozilla/mozvoikko

Comment 13

[Ville Pohjanheimo (inactive)]

Closing. This has been fixed in the most recent version of the dictionary 0.10.