Welsh / Cymraeg maintenance offer

Development
1

Hello,

I work with the organisation (Bangor University) responsible for creating the Welsh (Cymraeg) Hunspell data (.dic and .aff files). I am happy to package it and maintain it such that a `hunspell-cy` package exists for spellchecking. I’ve taken a look nixpkgs and it seems like I might have to modify nixpkgs/pkgs/by-name/hu/hunspell/dictionaries.nix at 64a080cfbfc6ef4ea64ba021f18a717bf21d52dd · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub , and create and offer a source for the package files? I’m not very familiar with NixOS so would appreciate some assistance here.

I’ve never packaged software for Linux distros, but I am fairly active with KDE https://invent.kde.org/finw and have been providing the Hunspell data for LibreOffice https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/27374 / https://github.com/fin-w/LibreOffice-Geiriadur-Cymraeg-Welsh-Dictionary, so I’m certain I can maintain the `hunspell-cy` package long-term.

Can somebody help me get started?

Many thanks,

Finley

2 Likes
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Yes it looks like you have found the correct file. Should be a case of copying an existing language, making modifications as necessary.

Though based on other dicts, it looks like the name would be something like hunspell-dict-cy-gb-libreoffice as opposed to hunspell-cy.

CONTRIBUTING.md describes how to fork nixpkgs and create a PR

More info on downloaders is described in pkgs/README.md#sources and nixpkgs manual Package fetchers, updating source hashes

Hope that helps :smiley:

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In fact, it looks like dictionaries that use mkDictFromLibreOffice don’t even require hashes

Edit: Ah, though your Libreoffice dictionary is an extension and not part of GitHub - LibreOffice/dictionaries, so you’d either have to make it part of that to add it to nixpkgs that way, or base the nix package on your existing LibreOffice extension like some dictionaries do

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Had another look and found GitHub - techiaith/hunspell-cy: Fersiwn wedi'i ddiweddaru o'r fersiwn Cymraeg o wirydd sillafu Hunspell. | An updated version of the Welsh version of the Hunspell spellchecker. which has a newer release than the LibreOffice extension and there are examples of building dictionaries with mkDict and fetchFromGitHub

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Yes. That Github link you shared always contains the most up to date public data available that we have released for Cymraeg, and we periodically update it when new data has been created.

I’ll take a look at mkDict / fetchFromGitHub, and thanks for the other pointers too. Is it just a case of making a merge request to nixpkgs and then the package is available for others? For Debian and Arch, contributing a package requires (at least) endorsement from preexisting maintainers.

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Is it just a case of making a merge request to nixpkgs and then the package is available for others?

Yes, others can use it before it is merged but they would have to reference your pull request or your fork of nixpkgs because it wouldn’t be in nixpkgs at that point

In order for your PR to be merged, a committer needs to review and merge it.
– CONTRIBUTING.md

Once it is merged, it will be available to anyone using master branch of nixkpgs.
It will also be built and made available in branches like nixos-unstable after a few days

You can also backport it to nixos-25.11 if acceptable for releases.