Re: [Pan-users] Upgraded 0.11.4 --> 0.13.2.91, but...

[Charles Kerr]

> On Sat, 7 Dec 2002 07:30:15 -0700 in
> address@hidden Duncan <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>> Interesting the spell checker works for you.  For some of us, it
>> doesn't (probably due to upgrading aspelll to 0.50 from 0.33).

On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 03:07:50PM +0000, Brian Morrison wrote:
> If you leave 0.33 installed as well and put 0.50 in /usr/local then it
> does work, but this is not ideal of course.

Neither RH nor Mandrake ship Pan with spellcheck, and that's the safe choice:
Pan's spellchecking crashes a lot.
 
The gtkspell library, which Pan uses for spellchecking, is pretty good.
 
IMO the problem comes from the aspell/pspell/ispell setup underneath gtkspell.
To make a long story short, these are a mess.  The gtkspell crashes I've seen
in Pan came from uncaught C++ exceptions deep inside old versions of aspell.
It's not gtkspell's, or Pan's, responsibility to catch these exceptions.[1]

aspell 0.50 is apparently an all-in-one package to replace ispell, pspell,
and older versions of aspell.  If aspell 0.50 is as good as it sounds,
gtkspell (and, by extension, Pan) should use aspell 0.50 and drop the
other prerequisites.
 
cheers,
Charles

[1] in fact, we _can't_: neither Pan nor gtkspell are written in C++.