If this is implemented, please make it an optdepend à la Debian. Not everyone who uses mc uses mcedit. FWIW, Fedora disabled it a while back [1].

[1] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mc/blob/rawhide/f/mc.spec#_163-166

Due to the new gtk design that isn't to my taste, I replaced Meld for the moment by mcdiff. By default mcdiff does use mcedit to edit the compared files. I'm new to mcdiff, so I don't know if the editor can be replaced by another editor. I don't necessarily need a spell check, if I edit compared files, but there is a chance that this feature be of use sometimes. I probably can replace Meld already by something else. However, at the moment I have replaced it by mcdiff and since mc supports spell checking, without becoming bloated, so why not enabling it?

I'm not sure what Jindrich meant with this comment. The package is weird in various other ways - instead of using official release tarballs, he's pulling stuff from GitHub and then rebootstrapping the build system.

If 1) mc is built with aspell 2) aspell libraries are installed, but 3) dictionaries are not found, the error message is shown:

https://github.com/MidnightCommander/mc/blob/7fe3f4c898d029e87faa439ebd7297214059f710/src/editor/spell.c#L318

If aspell libraries are not installed, or mc is built without aspell, then error message is not shown, even though the dictionaries are not present.

So just don't depend on aspell, and the message with not be shown. Otherwise we can change the logic (patches welcome), but so far, nobody complained in the last 10 years.

I'm a bit lost here. Yury (or anybody) can you confirm that this package will still be fully functional (warnings notwithstanding) if compiled with aspell present and with the option enabled, but without aspell at runtime. In other words *can* we even make it an optdepends or would it have to be a hard dependency?

Hi Caleb,

I can confirm that (for the details, check the source code I linked).

As I said, aspell libraries are loaded with `dlopen` at runtime. If they are not found, then no warning is shown. If they are found, but aspell is not functional, then a warning is shown. If they are found and aspell is functional, then spell check is enabled.

However, in order to have this functionality in the first place, aspell has to be present at the build time.

Yury.