[Dict-common-dev] How to use hunspell with ispell.el in emacs22 now?

[John Steele Scott]

Hi,

The Australian English dictionary is only available as a Myspell/Hunspell 
dictionary. To use this with Emacs' flyspell-mode, it used to be that I 
could follow my instructions at <http://www.users.on.net/~toojays/emacs-
en_au.xhtml>. On the Emacs side this just required (setq ispell-program-
name "hunspell").

At some stage (in the last 12 to 18 months?) Debian has made changes to 
ispell.el which stop this from working. I *think* the definitive way to 
solve this in my .emacs should be to use the following. This should work 
on Debian and non-Debian systems.

(if (executable-find "hunspell")
    ;; Use hunspell, so we can use the en-AU dictionary.
    (progn
      (setq ispell-program-name "hunspell")
      (setq ispell-local-dictionary-alist '(("australian"
					     "[A-Za-z]" "[^A-Za-z]" "[']" nil
					     ("-d" "en-AU")
					     nil iso-8859-1)))
      (ispell-change-dictionary "australian" t))
  (message "Hunspell not found."))

However, this hangs when I try to run ispell-region.

Can anybody help me debug this? Where in ispell.el could the problem be?

check-ispell-version says:

@(#) International Ispell Version 3.2.06 (but really Hunspell 1.2.6),
 ispell.el 3.6 - 7-Jan-2003 (+ Debian `dictionaries-common' changes)

As an aside, I find it odd that there is nothing mentioned about ispell.el in the
Debian changelog. :(

regards,

John