Release 0.11.0 of GitHub Spellcheck Action has just been uploaded to the GitHub marketplace.

This release introduces experimental support for German including Swiss and Austrian.

The reason for the experimental label is that the support might change in the future since the implementation is not completely satisfactory.

With release 0.11.0 of the action English and German is supported. Aspell supports 51 additional languages/dictionaries and enabling them all increases the size of the Docker image significanly with 395 MB to be exact:

jonasbn/github-action-spellcheck    latest               1b331977ffa7   3 hours ago     559MB
jonasbn/github-action-spellcheck    0.9.0                1d2315be5e30   2 weeks ago     164MB
jonasbn/github-action-spellcheck    0.9.1                1d2315be5e30   2 weeks ago     164MB

The above numbers are based on an older release and are lifted from issue #35.

The first versions of the action built the Docker image dynamically on every run, which meant a long runtime. With release 0.5.0 the action was changed to use a pre-built Docker image served from DockerHub.

This decreased the run time, but introduces the issue of the image being immutable and dictionaries have to be present in the image in order to be utilized by the action.

The decision on including the German dictionary was based on the fact that is the first addition of a language besides English, meaning that it is not assumed that request for support of the additional 51 languages will be a realistic use case. Support for additional languages and dictionaries will be added if requested, meanwhile a better implementation strategy is being sought.

So do not hesitate to request support for another language, all 51 will propably be denied for now, but I would really love for this action to include all the languages, if there is a need. A better implementation just have to be thought up and made.

Another issue, which is not directly related to this release, but it's upload to DockerHub made me reflect.

When Docker images are becoming stale (no longer being downloaded), I tend to remove these from DockerHub.

Currently releases 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 have not been downloaded for a month, so I could remove these. I have previously removed 0.5.0 and 0.6.0 without any issues (that I know of). But there could be less active repositories on GitHub pointing to older versions of the action and they will break when attempting to run.

Updating is recommended, but still is seems bad practice.

I am going to freeze the deletion of older images from DockerHub for now and will investigate possible use on GitHub, since I know what to look for.

Any pointers, ideas etc. are most welcome.

• One could be to keep images forever (but do I want to support them)
• Implementation of a sunset policy for older images

Well let not me keeping you from enabling GitHub Spellcheck Action for your repositories and checking the spelling of your German and English documentation.

Change log

0.11.0 2021-02-19 feature release, update not required

• Added support for German spelling: lang: de, including: Swiss and Austrian dictionaries addressing issue #35 via PR #36. This is experimental and will need further investigation. Aspell support 53 different dictionaries and supporting them all increases the Docker image size significantly so dynamic loading of dictionaries has to be investigated further, without increasing build time to a point where a pre-built Docker image is not longer feasible