[Snowball-discuss] snowball maintenance, a review

[Martin Porter]

I wanted to apologise to the group at large for the slowness of
response to the questions, reports and fixes that came to
snowball-discuss in 2012, and so far this year. Some explanation is in
order I feel. Basically, I am slowing down with age (I'll be 70 next
year), and Richard is now very busy with work, commuting and family.
We are in touch, but have not met up now for several years.

I've made a summary of what I think are all the oustanding issues.
They are not forgotten, and we do hope to address them.

Damian Janowski, 16 March 2012

--- began a discussion about unaccented Spanish endings that led to
the idea of a possible migration of the whole of snowball to GitHub.

[I've now talked this over with Richard. We are going to leave things
as they are on snowball.tartarus.org for the moment.]

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Miles Shang, 17 Jul 2012, wrote

I would like to point out that whereas the C version of the
snowball-generated Porter stemmer correctly generates the output “s”
(just the character s, no quotes) for the input “s”, the Java version
generates the empty string.

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Andrej Burja, 18 Oct 2012

-- asks how to add new languages to pystemmer

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Dag Odenhall, 22 Dec 2012, wrote

In this process [creating Haskell bindings to the snowball library], I
have also discovered that the UTF_8 versions of the stemmers in
libstemmer_c appears to be broken. Testing my bindings against the
test files in the Snowball distribution (the diffs.txt files) it
failed early, basically as soon as it encountered any unicode (in
Hungarian, which was the first language it tested). I also had a
problem with my app that uses the bindings crashing when encountering
unicode in Swedish (although actually using the English stemmer).

[But at least we know UTF_8 works for the stemmers in general.]

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Marijn van Vliet, 21 Jan 2013, wrote

When trying to install the Python wrapper (PyStemmer), the install process
fails on windows with a slew of
messages:

. . . .

This is caused by a bug in setup.py, which fails to find all required .c
files. A possible fix would be to change line 24 from:

     and os.path.split(line.strip())[0] in library_core_dirs]

to:

     and os.path.split(line.strip().replace(' \\', ''))[0] in library_core_dirs]

[Not yet applied.]

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