[Dict-common-dev] Re: Inclusion of flyspell.el

[Agustín Martín Domingo]

Roland Rosenfeld wrote:
> 
>>I do not remember the specific reason to include the file, but
>>Roland had one, for sure.
> 
> 
> I also don't remember (dictionaries-common is some years old now and
> still not merged into Debian...). 

Hi, Roland, I am happy to read from you:

We hope that in the middle/end september will be merged, but this has 
taken so long that until we do it I will not be sure about that.

> I think that the problem was, that
> there was no or only a quite old version of flyspell.el in some the
> emacs19/emacs20/xemacs20 packages (same problem as with ispell.el,
> which we also ship in dictionaries-common).
> 

I am cheking in my old partition:

emacs19 had no flyspell.el
emacs20 has a 1998 version, but I do not find the version string
emacs21 has a 2001 version, but I also do not find the version string
xemacs21 has version 1.6g of 2002, rather recent.

Yesterday I changed flyspell.el in dictionaries-common to the latest one 
(1.6h), since we were still shipping 1.6a, just to test whether the 
problem was fixed that way or not.

By the way, Roland, are you following the dict-common-dev mailing list? 
Just to avoiding cc you and know whether you know the origin for this 
thread. In case you are not this was the origin:

When byte compiling flyspell.el in emacs19 and  emacs20 it verifies 
whether ispell is or not available and if is not fails with an eror 
about that

     Wrote /usr/share/emacs20/site-lisp/dictionaries-common/ispell.elc
     While compiling toplevel forms in file
     /usr/share/emacs20/site-lisp/dictionaries
     -common/flyspell.el:
       !! File error (("Searching for program" "no such file or
       directory" "ispell")).

There is no problem with emacs21 and I think xemacs21. The problem is 
that dictionaries-common can be installed in a system with only 
wordlists and no ispell, and then on emacsen byte compilation flyspell 
will fail, breaking installation. flyspell.el needs that check on 
program run, but probably not on byte compilation, but it does it.

> In the good old times flyspell.el was changing fast, which resulted in
> outdated versions of it in most emacsen packages.  So it was a good
> idea to ship this with dictionaries-common.  If all emacsen packages
> come with a recent version of flyspell.el now, we can remove this from
> dicitionaries-common.
> 
Considering that emacs19 is no longer in Debian, emacs20 is the only one 
that seems to provide a rather old flyspell.el. Do you think it worths 
putting a more recent flyspell.el in dictionaries-common?

Cheers,

Agustin

-- 
=====================================================================
Agustin Martin Domingo, Dpto. de Fisica, ETS Arquitectura Madrid,
(U. Politecnica de Madrid)  tel: +34 91-336-6536, Fax: +34 91-336-6554,
email:agmartin@aq.upm.es, http://corbu.aq.upm.es/~agmartin/welcome.html