Subject: Re: bug#6143: 6143 ispell not fixed

From: Agustin Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2010 12:19:22 +0200

On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 06:01:10PM +0200, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > I have just commited a change that should use "~/" as default-directory
> > unless Ispell per-directory personal dicts are used and not in a minibuffer
> > under XEmacs.
> 
> Could you explain (ideally in a comment in the code) why the minibuffer
> case is important, 

Minibuffer case is now a very marginal case which will currently appear only
when directory-specific dictionaries are used under Ispell, and someone tries 
to spell-check stuff in the minibuffer (like jidanni did for FSF Emacs).
Without the change, in that very marginal case, everytime the minibuffer is 
closed ispell process will be killed.

> why we distinguish the Emacs-vs-XEmacs cases, 

I try to introduce as few XEmacs incompatibilities as possible, even if
current ispell.el and flyspell.el do not work under XEmacs. I still use FSF
Emacs ispell.el and flyspell.el as base for Debian, patched so they work even
with XEmacs.

I'd ideally like to decrease the number of Debian changes added just for
XEmacs compatibility by committing some of them to bzr repo. 

Also, since most of the Debian changes are already committed to FSF Emacs 
bzr repo, I'd like to sit down and see what else is needed for FSF Emacs 
ispell.el and flyspell.el to be integrated with our Debian dictionary
registration mechanism. If that seems of enough wide use, I'd like to push
changes to bzr.

I have some other changes pushed to Debian that should go into FSF Emacs
repo (I sometimes try things first in Debian).

> and why
> we use (fboundp 'minibuffer-selected-window) rather than (featurep
> 'xemacs) to check whether we're in XEmacs (I see this use comes
> from the earlier code, but maybe it's an opportunity to change it,
> since (featurep 'xemacs) is treated specially by the byte-compiler to
> generate more efficient code and to avoid spurious warnings).

Someone asked Stephen Turnbull if it was posible to implement
`minibuffer-selected-window' in XEmacs and he asked for code. So, I left
that possibility open.

Unless is a known design choice, I usually prefer to check for
variable/function availability, in case that is later implemented.

-- 
Agustin