the public domain word list at: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Moby/ It's "official" word list seems to be about twice as big as the current words file. Perhaps worth investigating?
Hardly anything uses the package anyway... it's not used as a spelling dictionary, for one. Any reason why we need to keep it?
suspect there are a fair amount of 3rd party/perl scripts/etc that use it. I seem to recall some griping when it moved to /usr/share/ I use it occasionally with `look foobar` or just grepping it to find proper spelling, but I have no idea how common that useage is. does lsb require it?
We'll stay with the current one for now.
Could we get this changed from "wontfix" to "later" or something? The current word list *really* does suck -- it's full of arbitrary omissions. See bug #77071 for some random examples. I'll not reopen this myself, but I hope you will consider doing so. The SCOWL project -- already used by aspell -- seems like it'd provide a good alternative. (It'd be kind of nice for the word list to actually line up with the words being used by the spellchecker....) http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/
Not much of a reason not to update to a better list!
*** Bug 77071 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Strangely, the bugzilla was not updated to reflect this change being applied: words-3.0-5 ----------- * Tue Mar 29 2005 Karel Zak <kzak> 3-2 - replace word list with much better Moby Project words list (#61395) - revise %description; ispell/aspell no longer uses words