Re: flyspell bug

[Richard Stallman]

      However, the installed change is too radical.
    It affects all users of ispell having aspell in exec-path.

Preferring aspell to ispell will inevitably do that.
It is the price that must be paid for a change that we will make
sooner or later.

We are going to switch to preferring aspell sometime.  If aspell is
not ready, we can't do it.  If aspell is ready now, sooner is better
than later.

    If switching from ispell to aspell was intentional (I can't find
    a discussion about this on emacs-devel) then we need to document
    it in the NEWS file with a warning about possible problems, to inform
    maintainers of ispell.el and aspell about this change asking them to
    update documentation, web pages, and to test aspell dictionaries
    to confirm their compatibility with ispell.el.

We're not building airplanes, you know.  Ideally in the absence of
resource constraints we would do all these things, but we don't have
to do them all.  We should not evaluate development choices as if we
were going to do them with the level of care that would be required
for building airplanes.

    But perhaps switching from ispell to aspell was too hasty change.
    According to aspell's TODO list, ispell.el is not quite ready for
    using aspell.

I would not rely on aspell's TODO list for the very latest information
on the status of ispell.el development.  The facts we are observing
directly about ispell are much more authoritative than a report
that might be old.