Subject: Problems between Flyspell and Enchant

From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2020 00:53:52 +0100

[I'm the Enchant maintainer and author of the Enchant support in ispell.el,
so it's All My Fault :) Sorry!]

I cannot reproduce the problem with numbers being detected as misspellings
from the command line with enchant-2 2.2.8 or 2.2.10. (As all the digits
are in WORDCHARS, it is expected that numbers should pass spell-checking.)

I looked into the matter of "-B". It would be quite tiresome to have to
teach ispell.el which spelling checkers accept -B. I notice that hunspell
does not support -B, but it does accept it; indeed, it seems to happily
accept and discard any unknown option. I think Enchant should silently
ignore -B, as it does with -m to work with Emacs.
I agree that the en_US dictionary should contain ' in its WORDCHARS. I
found another, recent, Debian bug about this, this time on the correct
package (the dictionaries):
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=964257 I have merged the
two bug reports in the hopes that this might help!

Note that quotation marks work correctly in the Debian en_GB dictionary,
though there is another problem there: WORDCHARS contains only the curly
quote. This is because hunspell contains the following special rule: if
either the straight or curly single right quote is listed in WORDCHARS,
then the other is also allowed. I have implemented this logic in Enchant
2.2.10 in its hunspell backend (recently released).

I found a couple of minor bugs in enchant: first, it gives an unhelpful
error message when asked for a language it doesn't have; and secondly, at
least for me `enchant-lsmod-2 -list-dicts` does not list the en_US
dictionary even though it is installed. I will look into those, as the
second in particular affects Emacs.

I agree with the patch to ispell.el, in all three points, though for me the
invocation of enchant-lsmod-2 does not fail with the extra argument (this
will be why I didn't notice the problem when I originally wrote the code).
I am happy to install this patch if Eli agrees.

-- 
https://rrt.sc3d.org