[Dict-common-dev] Visibility of the dictionaries-common Policy

[Agustín Martín Domingo]

Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> 
> 
>>Aspell manuals suggest that the best way to set aspell as spellchecker 
>>under emacs is to put
>>
>>(setq-default ispell-program-name "aspell")
>>
>>in the ~/.emacs file, but I am afraid that is read after all the lisp 
>>dict-common stuff is read. Otherwise some sort of 
>>emacsen-aspell-dicts.el file could be generated or one hardcoded added 
>>to the package and read if aspell selected.
> 
> 
> This variable is defined in the file ispell.el, a modified version of which
> is provided by the dictionaries-common package.  I thiunk we could easily
> modifiy that file to check the value of the variable each time a ispell
> process is created and act accordingly if it is "aspell".  By the way, there
> are already some check for aspell being done in the code (at function
> check-ispell-version):

The problem is that the above aspell line is defined in ~/.emacs that is 
the very last file loaded by emacs, and the dictionary-alists are loaded 
long before that line is read. So, unless we manage to know that info in 
an early stage is not that simple to selectively load different 
emacsen-{i,a}spell-dicts.el at emacs load time.

In the meantime I put the system that was experimental in 
dictionaries-common unstable branch, that is, both ispell and aspell 
dicts can put an entry into emacsen-ispell-dicts.el and ispell entries 
win. Doing things that way spurious aspell entries might be in the 
alist, but not in the pop-up menus since ispell.el checks for that. In 
the other case, when aspell is selected, at least there are valid 
entries for the aspell dicts in the emacsen file and things are no worse 
(as a matter of fact they are better) than when ispell.el upstream alist 
is used. I still have to test things more and prepare some text that 
might go into the policy document or this case.

Cheers,

-- 
=====================================================================
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