Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 96410
Deleting Australian English Dictionary disables other english spelling checkers.
Last modified: 2013-02-24 20:42:22 UTC
Deleting Australian English Dictionary extension English Australian Dictionary 2008.11.20 disables other English spelling checkers and crashes when thesaurus is called. I is http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/node/1581 and is now unpublished (hidden). It cause no problem is left in place. I own up to this. It is all my fault. I updated the Australian English but the identifier value in the description.xml had <identifier value="org.openoffice.en.hunspell.dictionaries" /> rather than <identifier value="org.openoffice.en_AU.hunspell.dictionaries" /> as it was supposed to be. This has meant that the extension has been auto downloaded by 100,000 users ! The extension only adds the en_AU.dic and the en_AU.aff files. However the dictionaries.xcu file mentions the other english dictionaries. It seem that if the extension is removed it removes the other spelling dictionaries. The repair process is then needed to fix the problem. I can fix the English Australian Dictionary extension but is there anything than can be done to limit the damage and inconvenience to 100,000 users who have downloaded the extension and try to delete/remove it ?
The problem seems to be confined to Windows XP etc. systems. Neither installation or removal causes any problems on my Linux system. See the discussion at http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12340&p=57999#p57999
I think it would affect all Windows versions. So in regards to fixing the current situation, I would suggest that the "en" branch receive a new update, which is just the original standard English extension. People who have the latest broken update would receive this and fix their problem. Unfortunately, users who still have the original update would be subjected to an update which would basically do nothing. I don't see any way around this except just ignoring the people that downloaded the broken update, and let them fix it themselves, which is also quite reasonable. In regards to the "en_AU" branch, this will be easy to fix. Simply release a new "en_AU" update with the intended fixes. The only issue here is that a number of people will have been bumped off the "en_AU" branch (and strictly onto the "en" branch). Nothing can be done about this small problem, and when people realise they have no English(Australian) dictionary installed they will be able to find the latest version. It may be best to leave things as they are since only a small number are affected, it's not hard to fix if they visit the forums, and the new version of OO is not far away.
I do not know if this is a related problem: My English spellchecking does NOT work at all since the latest versions of OOo. I am currently using OOo-dev 3.1 (m37). However, I think that the English spellchecking was broken since at least m35, and probably since m29 as far as I can remember. I have installed the English version of OOo. Running Win2k SP4 English version. I have uninstalled a long way back the stable release of OOo and I am installing since then only the dev builds, which caused some problems back then. The English spellchecking problem could be related to this fact as well. However, installing even the dev-build should install all the necessary files. I do not think that I have removed the Australian dictionary [though I am unsure IF my previous uninstall could have triggered that behaviour]. If this issue is unrelated, I will open a new bug report. However, please understand that I switched back to MSO at home after more than 2 years of using exclusively OOo. Not only that the spellchecking is broken, but this is compounded by the irritable red-lining which refuses to disappear. I can confirm: selecting some text and selecting Thesaurus will crash OOo (as stated in a previous post). So probably my issue is indeed related to this issue.
Yes, the action mentioned on the forum corrected the problem. http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12340&p=57999#p57999 It is possible that the error was triggered when I updated some/all extensions, though I do not remember exactly when I made a full update (it could be after installing m35). Though, correcting this bug in the main branch of OOo seems highly desirable.