Spell checker not working in Kmail

[Duncan]

Daniel D Jones posted on Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:58:56 -0500 as excerpted:

> Running Kmail 1.12.3 under KDE 4.3.3 on Gentoo.  Options/Automatic
> Spellchecking is checked and the status line at the bottom of Composer
> shows "Spellcheck: on" but no spellchecking occurs.  Manually selecting
> Tools/Spelling does not give any errors and shows the message "Spell
> check complete."  But no mispelled words are marked, including nonsense
> strings like "lakjdfh."
> 
> KDE's global language is set to US English.  Default language under
> Composer's Settings/Spellchecker is likewise set to English.
> 
> I've spent awhile searching the web and can't find anything on
> configuring or troubleshooting spellchecker other than the couple of
> settings mentioned above.  I have both aspell and ispell installed on
> the system, although I don't believe KMail uses either anymore.  The
> spellchecker is now supposed to be called Sonnet but there doesn't
> appear to be a package for installing it, so I assume that it's a part
> of the Kmail/Koffice install.
> 
> This is a recent install following a system crash and reinstall, and is
> the same version of Kmail, KDE and the same distro that I was running
> previously, and spellcheck worked normally there.  My home directory is
> mounted from a different hard disk from the system, and all of my other
> KDE and Kmail configurations were preserved, so it seems unlikely to be
> something in my config.  Any clues or ideas on how to get this working
> would be greatly appreciated.

It sounds like you had a backup (well, it was on another disk that didn't 
crash) of /home.  What about your USE flags?  Just off the bat, without 
looking, it sounds to me like one of them (probably spell) is different, 
somewhere, so kde isn't being built with the required dependencies.

Yes... sure enough, kdelibs has the spell USE flag.  I'm guessing that's 
it.  Looking at the ebuild code, turning that on requires as 
dependencies, app-text/aspell, app-text/enchant and app-dicts/aspell-en, 
and of course you'd add other aspell dicts as necessary.  Then the 
src_configure phase adds the aspell and enchant cmake config flags as 
necessary, turning them either on or off.

Neither kdepimlibs nor kmail itself seem to have any related USE flags, 
but you'll want to do a revdep-rebuild after rebuilding kdelibs, just to 
be sure.  Note that if you've not done it for awhile, you'll likely have 
a bunch of other rebuilds to do as well.  FWIW, if you merge lafilefixer 
and run it with the --justfixit option before running revdep-rebuild, 
it'll probably save you some rebuilding.  I actually have a little script 
that I run after all my updates, that first runs lafilefixer, then revdep-
rebuild.  Doing it after every update session keeps the system working 
well and the number of rebuilds to a minimum.

Of course, if you change the USE flag globally (not just for kdelibs), 
you'll probably want to do an emerge --newuse too, before the revdep-
rebuild stuff, just to catch any changed USE flags.  Again, the scripts I 
use do that routinely, here.  Every update is with --newuse.  (I also 
always use --deep, but that's a personal preference, and I always do an 
emerge --depclean after my updates too, just to keep the cruft levels 
down.  But again, be sure if you don't routinely run depclean, to check 
it for sanity using --pretend first, and make adjustments to your world 
file as necessary, before letting it go.  And after a depclean, run 
revdep-rebuild again, just to be sure...)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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