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[Pan-users] Re: Spell check in Pan


From: Duncan
Subject: [Pan-users] Re: Spell check in Pan
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 23:30:28 -0700
User-agent: Pan/0.14.2.91 (As She Crawled Across the Table)

John Phillips posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,
 on Tue, 13 Apr 2004 01:41:19 +1000:

> On Mon, 12 Apr 2004 08:05:45 -0400 you wrote:
> 
>>      Which version are you using?  The current Pan, 0.14.2.91, has 
>> spell-checking available as a *compile-time* option.  It was
>> introduced in version 0.13.0, but if yours does not have it you will
>> likely need to re-install Pan using an rpm, deb, tbz or whatever
>> (depending on your distro) that was built with spell-checking enabled.
> 
> Thanks for the reply - using 0.14.2.91, loaded from a Mandrake 10.0
> distro with KDE desktop.  Hmm, would have thought the spell checker
> would be there!

I'm a Mdk user myself, but that's one of their minor irritants, here.  I
always compile from source tarball with spellcheck enabled to avoid the
problem.

Mandrake's position, given that it's of French decent but the distribution
is English, and many European users may be fluent in other languages as
well, is that it's to difficult (and unintuitive) to change the
spell-checked locale.  All one needs to do is quit PAN, change an
environmental variable, and restart using the new value, but I CAN see how
that could be a bit irritating for bi- tri- multi- lingual users, altho
I use only English here.  Anyway, until there's a GUI method for changing
it "on-the-fly", probably within PAN itself, Mdk's philosophy is that
spell-checking in their binary version stays disabled.

Of course, you can get spell-checking without having to compile from
tarball.  You can simply rebuild the appropriate Mdk SRPMs with the
appropriate flags, if desired, or d/l from rebelbase.com (PAN's home site)
either Mdk or RH/Fedora RPMs that are spell enabled and install them. 
(Note that the RH/Fedora ones use a slightly different library package
naming convention, last I checked, so you may have to verify libraries
manually and "force" the installation, but I did that for some time with
no other issues, as I knew the Mdk libraries were installed and it found
and used them.  Only RPM itself couldn't figure it out, given the
different package naming schemes.)

However, here, I prefer tarball for PAN for other reasons as well, the
biggest probably being that I'll often install the tarballs the same day
a release is announced, before there are appropriate rpms available, and
once I decided to go tarball, it was just easier to /always/ use the
tarball method, since the default tarball installation is to
/usr/local/bin, while the default rpm installation is to /usr/bin, and I
got tired of removing the OTHER one manually, when I switched.

Anyway, yes, spellchecking is available, with the appropriate compile-time
options and correct libraries installed.  However, you will NOT get it
from the official Mdk package, and that's not likely to change any time
soon, as there's a reason behind their policy, whether it fits you and me
individually, or not.

(My  current project is to get Gentoo up and running.  This isn't an issue
one would have there, as altho binary packages are available, Gentoo is
more a source-based distribution with binaries available, while Mdk is a
binary based distribution with source available.  Anyway, because Gentoo
users normally compile from source, and the distribution puts a LOT of
stress on allowing the end user-admin to configure just what's compiled in
or compiled out, you'd simply set your use flags for your default
preferences and all package ebuilds that could take advantage of such
rules would do so, based on the use flags set in make.conf.  Of course,
the defaults there can be overridden if needed, as well, but the point is
the user sets the policy, NOT the distrib, and the distrib packagers
simply have to make sure they check for the appropriate flags and compile
accordingly.)


-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin






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