Subject: bug#24439: ispell.el; cutom setting `ispell-library-directory'; patch

From: Laimonas Vėbra <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2016 23:10:49 +0300

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Well, using a Cygwin ispell with a native Windows build of Emacs is
> not exactly the normal use case, either.  Why don't you use a native
> Windows build of ispell (or a Cygwin build of Emacs)?

I can't find one (ispell win32) and i guess it is not trivial to build.
And now i'd like to ask you why i don't see ispell in ezwinports...? :-)
Anyway, i use cygwin (a lot of it), but prefer native Emacs. Hunspell 
works with myspell dictionaries, right? (then maybe it is the best 
solution to my cygwin ispell problem).

> Can you propose a patch and test it in your setup?  Or would you like
> me to propose a patch for you to test?

Ok, i'll try. But i'm going to propose two patches; one as you proposed 
and another, where dictionaries would be looked up in this order:
  * -d if it's absolute path;
  * ispell-library-directory;
  * custom directory (say defcustom ispell-local-library-directory).

> not for the fact that Emacs doesn't understand Cygwin file names (if I
> understand correctly the nature of your problem).  So going back to

cygwin ispell reports its LIBDIR as '/usr/local/lib'. Even some old 
win32 build(s), i once had, had LIBDIR pointing to '/usr/lib' and 
dictionaries should have been be placed in C:\usr\lib... :-)

> manual configuration would be a step in the wrong direction, IMO.

IMO its the same kind of manual configuration as to manually specify 
dictionaries with -d (absolute path). `ispell-local-library-directory' 
would be transparent to user (won't require any 
configuration/consideration if he doesn't use it).