The Hazards of Love

May 5, 2009 Uncategorized 43 Comments

while I’m rebuilding my jhbuild setup in order to roll out gnome-utils 2.27.11 I started pondering on a couple of questions:

  1. why are we still shipping the dictionary applet?
  2. and, more importantly: why are we still shipping a DICT protocol client?

okay, I wrote them both — and I was just trying to save them from the horrid death-by-code-rotting fate they were condemned to — but at the time I did not stop and consider why2.

who in their right mind would still use a DICT client — when it’s not perfectly clear3 that only a few DICT servers are alive enough to be useful, and mostly for the english-speaking only world?

so, I ask the interwebs: what kind of electronic dictionary do you commonly use when you need one? do you use Wiktionary and Wikipedia? do you use another web service4? or do you use something local, with files you update semi-regularly? what do you use when you need to translate something?

I’d like to address this issue during the 2.27 cycle because I don’t want to let gnome-dictionary end up like gfloppy — a survivor of a different era that only recently we were able to just remove for something far more powerful and useful.

  1. hopefully before the cut-off time for the 2.27.1 release [↩]
  2. the software engineering and programming challenge were, foolishly, all I was interested in; I was young and eager to prove myself [↩]
  3. go on, look at the two dictionary providers we install with gnome-dictionary, and consider that those two have been the same since 2.12, that is seven development cycles ago [↩]
  4. with a public API, hopefully [↩]