Subject: Re: bug#19926: 24.4; `ispell-comments-and-strings' (somewhat) unclear docstring

From: Agustin Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2015 13:24:16 +0100

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 02:25:42PM -0500, Glenn Morris wrote:
> Agustin Martin wrote:
> 
> > Note that version above is only used in Debian/GNU*
> 
> Why does Debian distribute a duplicate ispell.el (and flyspell.el; both
> in the dictionaries-common package), and why does it differ from the
> version in Emacs (a quick diff seemed to show other differences)?

Initially this was done to have better integration with the spellchecking
dictionaries structure in Debian. However, relevant code has been integrated
in FSF Emacs trunk. Other reason was to add some bug fixes from trunk to all
available flavours and the last one to to use a version that can also be used
for XEmacs. 

I will soon change this, leaving current Debian version only for XEmacs
(ispell.el and flyspell.el shipped with XEmacs are ancient) and relying in
FSF Emacs pristine versions. I still have to commit a couple of things to
the emacs-24 branch, but I'd like to do this change in Debian at some time
after Debian "jessie" release. There are some recent changes in trunk that
will be hard to migrate to XEmacs and differences are expected to become
more and more important with time. If some bug appears that really needs a
fix, it can be fixed in the Emacs package.

> Since it ends up in site-lisp it is always going to shadow the Emacs version.

Should not unless subdirs.el is present in the dir containing the byte-compiled
stuff. According to policy for emacsen add-ons in Debian byte-compiled path
must be explicitly added, so it can be disabled. However, I just noticed that 
/usr/share/emacs24/site-lisp/subdirs.el is also present, so things will be
found even if path is not explicitly added. I think I warned about this some
time ago, because this makes harder to disable the Debian stuff, but I do
not remember having received a reply. Have to re-check.
 
-- 
Agustin