13. Linguistic data ships as separate distributions

Context

ADR 0010 put the German pack in core because it needed no data, and recorded the trigger for splitting data out: the first lexicon. The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary is that lexicon — 135,166 entries, 3.6 MB, BSD-2-Clause.

Decision

denckring-en-data is a separate distribution, a workspace member of this repository, installed by pip install denckring[en]. It registers through the same denckring.lang entry-point group as any third-party pack, and subclasses the core English pack rather than replacing it.

Pack precedence became: explicitly registered, then entry point, then built-in default. Without that last change the seeded core pack shadowed the data package entirely.

Consequences

The core wheel stays small and free of data, so a user who wants lipograms does not download a pronouncing dictionary. Data licences are quarantined per distribution: CMUdict's attribution requirement lives in LICENSE-CMUDICT beside the data it covers, and a future copyleft lexicon has an established place to go without touching the permissive core — which is what ADR 0006 requires.

The dictionary is vendored rather than downloaded, so neither installation nor use touches the network.

The cost is a uv workspace and a second pyproject.toml, and the fact that two distributions must now be released together when the pack interface changes.