[Evolution] Spell checker dependencies in Ximian's Debian packages

[Andrew Cowie <andrew operationaldynamics com au>]

[Preamble: I'm running Debian; yes (horrors) I'm running "testing" which
means the one *after* woody - that or unstable is what most people run
on desktops - fact of life. Since I can't get red-carpet to do anything
useful for me (yes I know the reasons) I have to install manually.

Kindly, the packaging team at Ximian continue to release .debs which
contain the latest build or release (thankfully so - building evolution
is the hardest build task I have ever seen). With a bit of extra effort
one can craft an apt-get sources.list [*] that will fetch these
packages. They are usually newer than are available in Debian unstable
which I don't wish to run) and thus I've been happily using Evo 1.2
since mid beta]


On to the topic of my message:


I've been trying to make the spell check functionality of evolution work
for, oh, a year or so now :)

I'd like to report my two major stumbling blocks with a view to
potentially improving the [new] user experience:

1.

Ximian's aspell package depended on something called libltdl0 . I note
that as packaged in Debian unstable there is a library called libltdl3
in the dependencies; nowhere is libltdl0 to be found in the standard
Debian releases (stable, testing or unstable). I finally found a copy in
"experimental" which is VERY difficult to download from. 

You may want to look into this as it made installing aspell very tricky.

Oh - I found out about aspell from this mailing list... which leads me
to:

2.

gnome-spell

I missed the "Suggests" dependency on gnome-spell in evolution's
package, so never installed it, and wondered why the spell checker in
evolution was disabled.

[installing via `apt-get install evolution`, as most middling-advanced
level Debian users are likely to do, does not install Suggested
dependencies]

I realize that the gnome-spell checker isn't core to Evolution per se,
but I must admit I wonder at why one would want to use such a high
powered mail client *without* having a spell checker available. Upping
the dependency to "Depends" would be strong medicine, but on the other
hand evolution all ready depends on almost every library there is... :)

Perhaps a middle ground would be "Recommends" rather than "Suggests" but
I really think that "Depends" would be the right thing to do. PGP (the
other thing "Suggested") is optional, yes, but a spell checker is core
to professional communications and has a rightful place in the install
of evolution.

--

Installing gnome-spell was the last stumbling block, and tonight I see
little red squiggles under words I can't spell. Fantastic.

Again, many thanks that Debian packages are available. I'm pleased to
report your woody (Debian 3.0) packages are running just fine on sid
(Debian 3.1?)

Happy New Year to all!

        Andrew



*For Debian users, the relevant sources.list lines I am using:


deb http://mirror.pacific.net.au/debian ../project/experimental main
deb http://ftp.ximian.com/pub/debian woody main




-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd

Australia +61 4 1079 6725  North America +1 646 270 5376

andrew operationaldynamics com au