Subject: bug#62775: 29.0.60; C-M-i or ispell-complete-word experiences "lookup-words error"

From: Van Ly <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2023 15:31:35 GMT

> > The unexpected behavior is the above error shown in the *Messages* buffer.
> 
> What is your value of ispell-alternate-dictionary?  I'm guessing it's
> nil, in which case the error message tells you what to do.

I was put off there by the fact it asks for a file and not the
dictionary program which could either be ispell or aspell or hunspell.

I gave up with that option and went looking for a word list file
reverse mapping to a package that provides it.  What I found was
confusion as to which package provides the en wordlist.

> I don't know whether modern Posix systems have a word-list file in
> some standard location installed; if they do, and that place is not
> looked up by the initialization of ispell-alternate-dictionary, we
> could add those other places to the list of standard locations.  But
> if the word-list file is generally not installed, then I think the
> error message is to be expected.

On debian, "apt-cache search wordlist" has results in addition to the
accompanying packages for language to aspell.

> I've now added the fact that a word-list file is necessary for
> ispell-complete-word to work to the command's doc string.  I don't
> think we should or can do anything else about it.

>From a user's perspective ispell-word and ispell-complete-word feel as
though they are facets of the one thing.  Ideally, if one aspect of
ispell works the rest should.

Emacs 29.0.90 has this undesirable behavior for ispell-complete-word.