On 1/25/26 1:08 PM, fin-w@tutanota.com wrote:

Hello,

Hi,

I work with the organisation (Bangor University) responsible for creating the Welsh (Cymraeg) Hunspell data (.dic and .aff files). I am happy to package it and maintain it such that a `hunspell-cy` package exists for spellchecking. I've taken a look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Package_Maintainers#How_do_I_become_a_Packa... and it looks like I would need to first maintain an AUR package to achieve this, as well as find two current package maintainers willing to sponsor me?

That link is referring to the Package Maintainer role, which are authenticated Arch Linux staff members that maintain packages in the official repositories. You don't need this to push a package to the AUR. All you need is an SSH key and to follow the guidelines [1].

I can see a user-contributed package exists here already https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/hunspell-cy-git though it hasn't been maintained recently. I'm happy to provide an alternate package, or take over maintenance, or skip AUR completely and provide an official package: whatever is Arch's process here.

That's a VCS package (denoted by -git suffix) [2], meaning it should build the latest commit in the repo. It's only out of date if building the package fails or if the package no longer works properly (like due to a change in build process or new dependencies). It's possible for a package like this to continue to work for years. If `hunspell-cy-git` isn't working, you may want to contact the current maintainer.

I've never packaged software for Linux distros, but I am fairly active with KDE https://invent.kde.org/finw and have been providing the Hunspell data for LibreOffice https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/27374 / https://github.com/fin-w/LibreOffice-Geiriadur-Cymraeg-Welsh-Dictionary, so I'm certain I can maintain the `hunspell-cy` package long-term.

Can somebody help me get started?

Arch packages are pretty simple! I think the best resources are the PKGBUILD wiki [3] and Arch package guidelines [4]. I'm not familiar with hunspell, but looking at the VCS hunspell-cy-git, and a couple of the PKGBUILDs in [extra] of other languages could be useful, for example hunspell-fr [5].

Many thanks,

Finley

Best Regards, AlphaLynx [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_submission_guidelines#Submitting_packag... [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VCS_package_guidelines [3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD [4] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_package_guidelines [5] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/hunspell-fr/-/blob...