1045 $ ispell -d francais test.ispell Illegal format hash table /usr/lib/ispell/francais.hash - expected magic2 0x9602, got 0x45 This must be a problem with ispell, not with the dictionary as I had installed the vary same francais.hash on my 6.0 system, and it was working fine with the 6.0 ispell package.
I finally found out what was happening, and when logging to this site, I doscover that this is in fact the same thing as for bugs 5874 and 6190. Because $LANG did not contain fr, the hash files were not installed, thus leaving around the old files from my own installation. Unsetting LINGUAS or setting it to fr befire reinstalling solved the problem. IMHO, this should be classified as a (small) bug in rpm because failing to install the only non-doc files of a package because of an incorrect variable should at least be notified by a warning message. If someone wants to install ispell-french, it is likely that he really wants a french dictionnary. Also, there should be an option to rpm -V to warn about non-installed files.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 4958 ***