[Aspell-user] Any way to keep ~/.aspell.en.pws sorted alphabetically?

[Eric Hanchrow]

I use Aspell on a number of different machines, and I keep a copy of
my ~/.aspell.en.pws on each -- and I keep those copies in sync by
using a revision control system that automatically merges files (i.e.,
if I change the file on machine A and check it in, then, on machine B,
get updates, the system will automatically merge in the changes from
A).  This is a nice way to keep my dotfiles with me wherever I go
(see http://www.kitenet.net/~joey/svnhome.html for a description).

Anyway, I've found that merging ~/.aspell.en.pws is more difficult
than merging most other files, since the file's entries are ordered
differently on different machines, even if they're the same entries.
For example, on one machine I might have

    personal_ws-1.1 en 2
    bar
    foo

and on the other

    personal_ws-1.1 en 2
    foo
    bar

(I don't know how the files got sorted differently; I assume that
Aspell did it by traversing a hash table which doesn't guarantee that
the entries will be retrieved in any particular order)
                                                       
This makes merging difficult, since the revision control system isn't
smart enough to realize that the two files are _effectively_
identical.

So I've been keeping the file sorted by hand, but this is tedious, and
probably error-prone (one of these days I'm going to put the wrong
number at the end of the first line, and who knows what'll happen
then)? 

So the ideal solution, for me, would be for Aspell to keep that file
sorted itself; that way the different copies of it would be easy to
merge automatically.

Is this worth doing?

-- 
If you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives
you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
        -- Paul Graham