On 06.11.2012 16:40 UK Time, rebro wrote:
>
> Of course, right at the moment we should stick to the older versions of
> the German and British English dictionaries if we want to avoid this issue.
> However I am not convinced that the two recent versions of these
> dictionaries are to blame. I am in line with the reviews by Endoro8 and
> tibitts
> (
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/dictionary-switcher/?src=search)
> when they suggest that Dictionary Switcher should adapt to the new
> situation.
> -rebro
I asked Alfredo Díaz about the situation, i.e. I asked him whether he is
aware that the latest versions of the German and English dictionaries
create a new "Dictionaries" category under Add-ons Manager, which the
dictionary switcher add-ons don't seem to be able to handle yet, and I
pointed him to this thread.
Here is his reply:
*********************************************************************
"Yes, I've been made painfully aware of it. 90% of my mail about
dictionary switcher is because of that now. .... Maybe you can update
everyone else: the guys at Mozilla break things!
For whatever reason, having dictionaries listed as 'Dictionaries'
instead of plain 'extensions' makes them invisible to the internal
Mozilla function getDictionaryList() (which, as you can guess, is pretty
specific [thus unrelated to 'extension types'] and constitutes the main
and only axis of any dictionary handling by extensions).
In other words, Mozilla broke it and everyone gets mad at me :-(
Fortunately, this is almost trivial to fix (but took bloody ages to
figure out). Edit the install.rdf file inside any dictionaries folders
or .xpi archives (check under both your profile and application folders
just in case) and delete / comment out the line "<em:type>64</em:type>"
and you're done until the next dictionary update reverts it or until the
guys at Mozilla fix this, whichever comes first. The down side is,
meanwhile the 'dictionaries' tab will be empty, and dictionaries will
get listed as regular 'extensions'. Oh, the horror!
*********************************************************************
My reply:
*********************************************************************
I'm not sure I fully understand who is to blame for the current
situation (i.e. the Mozilla guys or the dictionary guys?), but please
rest assured that I'm definitely not blaming you :-)
In any case, I'm quite happy to stick with the previous versions of the
German and the British dictionaries for now, but I can certainly pass on
your comments, explanation and solution in the "Dictionary Switcher
broken" thread in the Thunderbird newsgroup.
*********************************************************************
Further reply from Alfredo (who encouraged me to pass it on here):
*********************************************************************
Well, type 64 has been in the specs since I don't know when
(literally--it is there now, but...) but only very recently has it
become mandatorily added to dictionary .xpi. Not that it is tremendously
useful anyway...
Anyway, adding it to the dict installers should not break an internal,
specific function such as getDictionaryList(). I could understand it if
I had to change something like
getExtensionList(); someTypeCheck(); blahblahblah();
to
getExtensionListByType(64); yakyakyak();
but not the way it is (and always has been), so I guess it is the
dictionary guys to blame for not including the type since day 1, AND the
Mozilla guys for not checking that some simple thing like that breaks
getDictionaryList() (to which I'm contributing BTW by not filing a bug
report yet).
*********************************************************************
--
Herbert Eppel
www.HETranslation.co.uk