Re: [Pan-users] cann't activate spell check within pan 0.140

[Duncan]

Hongyi Zhao posted on Wed, 06 Nov 2013 11:21:31 +0800 as excerpted:

> Hi all, I use pan 0.140 compiled from the git repo.  But I found the
> spell check cann't take effect.  Any hints on this issue?  Thanks in
> advance.

First, just to be clear and eliminate the confusion I had when I first 
saw version 0.140 mentioned some weeks/months ago, thinking I must have 
missed a release announcement somewhere...

0.139 is the latest release version (there's a handy homepage option on 
pan's help menu, release versions can be checked there), but pan uses the 
"bump version first" method for its development/git version, so when 
0.139 was released, the git version became 0.140.  (FWIW, for git 
versions, both the about box and pan's user-agent header also mention the 
current git commit ID, thus nailing the development version down to a 
specific commit, not just the version number.)

So 0.140 currently refers to the development/git version and has not yet 
been released.  When it is, 0.141 will be the development/git version.

FWIW, on-list most people just refer to pan-git, or the git version, but 
including the git commit ID is recommended as well, just to be sure 
people are on the same page in terms of the behavior they're seeing.  
(Note that for people like me that post to the list using pan via 
gmane.org's list2news service, the posting version including git commit 
ID can be found in the user-agent header.  Of course that doesn't work if 
you're posting via mail, not using pan, and where it might matter, 
specifically mentioning the git commit ID is recommended, regardless.)

Now that /that's/ cleared up, to your question...

There's an additional dependency needed for spell-checking, and a 
configure option for enabling/disabling it.  Presumably you don't have 
the spell-checking library installed, or if you're on a binary-based 
distro that splits libraries into runtime and development packages, you 
don't have the development half of the package installed, and in the 
absence of the spell-check configure option being specifically set on (in 
which case the build should have errored out if it couldn't find the 
library), when the library wasn't detected by configure, the spell-check 
option was automatically disabled.

Referring to my ebuild here on gentoo (which builds from source using 
ebuild scripts), the required dependencies for spell-check are:

>=enchant-1.6

>=gtkspell-2.0.7 (but the 2.x version not 3.x, pan can build against gtk3 
but it's not recommended as a gtk3 build is buggier, so gentoo nails the 
dependencies to gtk2)

Verify that both of those are installed (along with their -dev/-devel 
half too if you're on a binary distro that splits libs that way).

The configure option is --with-gtkspell, to bind it ON, forcing a build 
failure if it's not detected, --without-gtkspell, to bind it OFF and 
build without the dependency, even if you have the library available.  
(That keeps "automagic" dependencies from occurring as they're nightmares 
for dependency tracking.)

Of course if you're trying the gtk3 version even if it's not recommended, 
you should /probably/ substitute gtkspell-3.x as well, but I build with 
gtk2 here, so I'm not sure on that.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman