[silpa-discuss] Changes made as part of GSoC - Call for Suggestions

[Balasankar C]

Hi,

I participated in Google Summer of Code program under Indic Project and
modified the stemmer and spell checker modules of LibIndic so as to incorporate
inflection handling ability to the spell checker. There were some other
structural changes that I brought to these repositories, which I intend to
inform the list through this mail. These changes are listed below.

0. Rename packages to include the 'libindic' keyword

The package spell checker was having a very general name "spellchecker" which
was ambiguous. It didn't communicate the information that the module was
specific for Indic languages or was under the LibIndic library. So, I renamed
the package to "libindic-spellchecker". Following the pattern, I renamed
indicstemmer to "libindic-stemmer" and indicngram to "libindic-ngram".


1. Use namespace packages (PEP 420)

I made the package structure to make use of the concept of namespace packages.
Changes caused due to this are
        a. Packages will get installed inside a single folder named libindic. 
Example:
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/libindic/ngram ,
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/libindic/stemmer,
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/libindic/spellchecker etc.
        b. Import statements will have the term "libindic" in them - More 
visibility
to LibIndic. Example: from libindic.stemmer import Malayalam

I believe these changes bring more visibility to the project and reduce
ambiguity about the packages. If it is ok with the everyone, I intend to do
this for other modules also.

* If the phrase "indic" already exists in the name, it will be removed. The
prefix "libindic-" will be added to the package names.
* For modules where code is different for different languages, the structure
will be libindic.<module>.<language> (eg: libindic.stemmer.Malayalam).
* For modules where the code is same for all languages, like chardetails, the
structure will be libindic.<module>.<Module> (eg: 
libindic.chardetails.CharDetails)


Please share your thoughts, suggestions and modifications about this. If there
is no objection, I intend to make these changes from 10th September.

-- 
Balasankar C
http://balasankarc.in