Re: [Pan-users] ANN: Pan 0.13.0.92 "What's the saga?"

[Charles Kerr]

On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 05:06:35PM -0700, Duncan wrote:

> I too agree with their decision not to do spell checking in the cooker 
> version.  Support for it gets a bit to complicated, at this point, as LeMay's 
> experience and mine demonstrate.  I'd do them no favors to add it, certainly 
> with the Linux newB community Mdk is quite popular with.  (And the reason I 
> chose Mdk, as I have been on Linux less than a year.)

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 was released just recently, and it's 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++.