Why was ispell removed?

[Kevin Oberman]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 12:43 AM, Tijl Coosemans <tijl at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 1 Dec 2014 13:58:04 -0700 Stephen Fisher <sfisher at SDF.ORG> wrote:
> > I recently noticed that the ispell port has been removed in favor of the
> > aspell-ispell port ("ispell compatibility script for aspell").  Does
> > anyone know why it was removed?  All I see on Fresh Ports is that it
> > was deprecated and finally removed in January of this year.
> >
> > (The ispell script for aspell doesn't fully replicate ispell
> > functionality such as checking words on the command line as shown below)
> >
> > Real ispell:
> > >ispell
> > @(#) International Ispell Version 3.3.02 12 Jun 2005
> > word: word
> > ok
> >
> >
> > word: ^D
> >
> >
> >
> > aspell script:
> > >ispell
> > Ispell compatibility script for Aspell.
> > Usage: /usr/local/bin/ispell [options] -a|-l|-v[v]|-c|-e[1-4]|<file>
>
> Give hunspell a try.  It's actively maintained and backed by Mozilla,
> OpenOffice, LibreOffice,...
>
> % hunspell -d en_US
> Hunspell 1.3.3
> Write a sontence here
> *
> *
> & sontence 2 8: sentence, consistence
> *
>

I'll admit that I may just be too lazy to hunt around for it, but:
 > hunspell -a en_US
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.2.06 (but really Hunspell 1.3.3)
Can't open en_US.
Exit 1

I looked though the system and found the following en_US dictionaries:
/usr/local/lib/firefox/dictionaries/
/usr/local/lib/libxul/dictionaries/
/usr/local/lib/linux-libgtkembedmoz/components/myspell/
I tried specifying one as the path (hunspell -p
/usr/local/lib/firefox/dictionaries/ -d en_US, but it then said:
Can't open affix or dictionary files for dictionary named "en_US". (Got the
same message for "-d en-US")

I have no idea why it can't open these files. They are present and
readable. In any case, I am at a loss on how to make hunspell work.
--
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com