[gentoo-dev] kmail on gentoo: how to make it use ispell

[Gold is Heavy]

Yo guys,

I figured out how to make kmail use ispell.  I couldn't take kmail not 
allowing me to do spell checking, so I used a handy strace command to see 
what the photon is going on.

strace -s 256 kmail --nofork > /tmp/kmail.log 2>&1 &

Ok, -s 256 allows me to see the entire strings in the function arguments.  
The reason I chose piping the output instead of using strace -o option is 
because I wanted to see kmail's own debugging output combined with strace.  
Looking quickly at the log file, I noticed that kmail was looking for

/usr/lib/ispell/english.hash

So, I got there, and of course, there is no english.hash file.  I type 'man 
ispell' and what do you know, it explains how to make .hash file.  So, I su 
to root, then do

cd /usr/lib/ispell
buildhash english.med english.aff english.hash

And, presto, kmail works.  It's still kinda weird, because kmail is supposed 
to recognize all the dictionaries installed, but it doesn't.  I don't think 
it understands /usr/lib/ispell/americanmed.hash stuff -- I think it wants to 
see /usr/lib/ispell/american.hash instead, maybe?  Or maybe not.  It works 
well enough now.

I hope this helps some of you.

--Leo