[Bug 619015] Re: dictionaries-common versions of ispell.el and flyspell.el break recent emacsen

[Luke Yelavich]

Thanks for your work, reviewing this now. All being well, tiw ill be
uploaded to maverick-proposed.

** Changed in: dictionaries-common (Ubuntu Maverick)
       Status: New => In Progress

** Changed in: dictionaries-common (Ubuntu Maverick)
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Luke Yelavich (themuso)

-- 
dictionaries-common versions of ispell.el and flyspell.el break recent emacsen
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/619015
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Status in “dictionaries-common” package in Ubuntu: Fix Released
Status in “dictionaries-common” source package in Maverick: In Progress
Status in “dictionaries-common” package in Debian: Unknown

Bug description:
Binary package hint: dictionaries-common

Emacs users who want to use flyspell (wavy underlines under misspelled words as you type) cannot on Maverick.  The root cause was a change in the Emacs Lisp syntax which breaks older versions of dictionaries-common.

TEST CASE: start Emacs, type Esc x flyspell-mode <ret> or equivalently enable Flyspell from Customize or the menu.

Failure scenario: an error message "Enabling flyspell-mode gave an error." (sic)

Success scenario: "Starting new ispell process ..."

A minimal patch is attached to this bug.  Upgrading dictionaries-common to upstream 1.5.12 should be equivalent.  Natty now ships 1.5.15 (bug #660367).  Maverick has 1.5.11.

The fix in 1.5.12 should be compatible with older Emacs versions; emacs22 (and to a limited extent xemacs21) should continue to work, while this fixes flyspell for emacs23 and emacs-snapshot users.

--- Previous version of Bug Description: ---

Please remove the following files from dictionaries-common:

/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/dictionaries-common/debian-ispell.el
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/dictionaries-common/flyspell.el
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/dictionaries-common/ispell.el

They are already provided with the emacs packages (emacs23-common and emacs-snapshot-common) and the versions provided with dictionaries-common are currently incompatible with the ones that are included in the emacs23-package:
When these files are installed any attempt to enable on-the-fly spell checking e.G. by M-x flyspell-mode will result in a generic error message:

Enabling flyspell-mode gave an error.

No debug info. And even if debug-on-error is set the error message is generated without setting any trigger for the debugger. Took me 2 hours to track this error down.

WORKAROUND: to fix this in a live system, remove the byte-compiled .elc files for your emacs flavor, too.  For example, if you use emacs23;

cd /usr/share/emacs23/site-lisp/dictionaries-common
sudo rm *.el *.elc

After removing the files spell checking while typing in emacs works fine again.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: dictionaries-common 1.5.11ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-15.21-generic 2.6.35.1
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-15-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Aug 17 03:51:38 2010
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_GB.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: dictionaries-common