system-wide location for dictionary files and dictionary file name format

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 12:42:22PM +0000, Caolán McNamara wrote:
> > Hmm, it seems language tags such as ‘nl’ or ‘fr’ without a region
> > component, and which are valid according to bcp47 are not recognized
> > by LO. Is this a bug I should report?
> 
> Only if you intend to work on solving it, is my opinion. It would be
> nice to support a bare "language" dictionary and have it in use for all
> variants unless there are more specific variants to use, but I don't
> intend to do it myself, or think my way through hacking firefox,
> enchant and the rest of the things that parse filenames in
> /usr/share/myspell|hunspell to also support that.

Firefox has no problem using ar.{aff,dic} for Arabic, neither does
gtkspell (or whatever GTK+ apps use). Only LibreOffice (and OpenOffice
before it) has problem using such dictionaries, and it turn packagers
duplicates the dictionary files to support LibreOffice e.g. the
hunspell-ar package on Debian has tens of ar_XX.{aff,dic} symlinks just
because of this.

This has long annoyed me, and I might give it a try if there are some
code pointers.

Regards,
Khaled