Subject: bug#6539: ispell-complete-word looks for wrong file (at least on w32)

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:39:59 +0300

> From: Lennart Borgman <[email-masked]>
> Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2010 19:32:33 +0200
> Cc: Agustin Martin <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
> 
> > For the rest, the patch looks fine, but why not test /usr/dict/words
> > with file-readable-p as well?  Then, if it does not exist, the
> > defcustom will evaluate to nil, and the error message will be even
> > more to the point.
> 
> 
> Such a test will make things even worse with unix style file names on
> w32 since they with these paths Emacs will look on the current drive.
> That does not have to be the same drive next time the library is
> loaded.

Why does it matter which file names are tried, if the net result will
be the same: to fail?

Read my lips: the _ONLY_ way to make this feature work on Windows is
to customize the value of ispell-complete-word-dict or that of
ispell-alternate-dictionary.  Unless you do that, this feature will
_ALWAYS_ fail on Windows; the only thing we can do is make the error
message more helpful.  And if the option _is_ customized, I trust the
user to include the drive letter in the value.