Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 91937
Flyspell broken in emacs 21.3-5
Last modified: 2015-01-07 19:05:16 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030509 Description of problem: I'm running a complete install of a fully up2date Red Hat Linux 9, but have been very selectively trying some packages from Rawhide - notably emacs, mozilla and epiphany. Emacs 21.3-1 (from Rawhide previously) works absolutely fine. However, upgrading to 21.3-5 breaks flyspell. It complains that there is no such program "ispell". I can provide further detail of my .emacs, etc. if needed. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): emacs-21.3-5 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install emacs-21.3-5, emacs-el-21.3-5, and emacs-leim-21.3-5. 2. Start emacs. 3. Load any file whose mode would start flyspell. Actual Results: Emacs won't load the file and complains that it can't find ispell. Expected Results: Emacs would load the file and turn on flyspell.
I'm not familiar with flyspell, can you give an explicit example of how to reproduce the problem? Can you reproduce the problem in a vanilla emacs started with say "emacs -q"? Currently `ispell-program-name' should be being set to aspell in "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/default.el". Perhaps you have `inhibit-default-init' non-nil?
Start emacs (21.3-5) using emacs -q. Emacs loads with banner. Click on banner to clear it, and drop into *scratch* buffer. Right click on mode line on (Lisp Interaction) and select Flyspell from pop up menu. Result: emacs beeps and prints: Searching for program: no such file or directory, ispell This does NOT happen with the previous build of emacs 21.3 from Rawhide.
Can you attach your .emacs and "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/default.el" files, please? A quick fix is just to add (setq ispell-program-name "aspell") to your .emacs file.
Okay, I'll attach ~/.emacs.el, ~/.emacs.customize.el (the file that customize writes to) and my /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/default.el next, but shouldn't emacs -q cause emacs to ignore those files?
Created attachment 92126 [details] My ~/.emacs.el file
Created attachment 92127 [details] My ~/.emacs.customize.el file
Created attachment 92128 [details] My /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/default.el
And which version of aspell do you have? No "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.d/aspell-init.el" I take it? Anyway, in the next built I will bring back the above ispell-program-name setting in site-start.el, since I agreed with the aspell pkg owner that site-start.el should carry the setting. Thanks for the report.
Aha! It's all Ximian's fault! I installed their Evolution 1.3.92, which required the removal of the original RHL9 aspell package and the installation of theirs: $ rpm -q aspell aspell-0.50.3-1.ximian.2 $ ls /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.d/aspell-init.el ls: /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.d/aspell-init.el: No such file or directory (Although the ispell-program-name setting in site-start.el which was removed for 21.3-5 but was presumably in the previous 21.3 Rawhide package explains why it was only with this package of 21.3 that I had this problem.)
I just tried the new emacs packages on Raw Hide (21.3-6, dated 5th June) and the problem is not solved - naturally I can work around the problem by adding: (setq ispell-program-name "aspell") to my ~/.emacs, but if I comment that line out and start emacs then I get the same old error (Searching for program: no such file or directory, ispell). I wasn't sure if this release was meant to fix this or not, so I thought I'd better just let you know.
I think the latest aspell package contains the ispell compatibility wrapper again. So I believe is now working ok out of the box.