Current courier mta ebuilds add "--with-ispell" if USE contains 'spell', however courier's configure script doesn't know what to do with this. The configure script will, by default locate and use ispell if it's in /usr/bin, as it is in gentoo. The "--with-ispell" option is for situations in which ispell is in a non-standard locations so if it's used with configure, a path to the location of ispell is required, e.g. "--with-ispell=/usr/bin/ispell". If the "--with-ispell" option is used and no path is specified, ispell won't be found and the build will proceed on the assumption that ispell doesn't exist. AFAIK, ispell is only used for spell-checking in courier's webmail component (SqWebMail). I'm attaching a diff against courier-0.52.2.ebuild which fixes the problem. With a little care, this could as easily be applied against the stable ebuild which is pretty much the same without the fam stuff. The fix is actually pretty simple. The patch causes the ebuild to check for both /usr/bin/ispell and the presence of the 'spell' USE var and if both are present, it adds the "--with-ispell=/usr/bin/ispell" option. If either is absent, "--without-ispell" is given as an option to the configure script. I've confirmed by experiement the behavior of "--with-ispell" but haven't tested to see if "--without-ispell" inhibits the inclusion of spell checking in the webmail client.
Created attachment 86810 [details, diff] Patch for various courier ebuilds to properly use ispell with the webmail client
Created attachment 86955 [details, diff] Better patch for above problem Because the courier build knows how to search for ispell in several places, and especially because it's capable of using aspell rather than ispell if the former is the only spellchecker on a system, it's better to let the configure and build do its own work and locate either program. This means that if the USE='spell' we should omit --with-ispell=/path/to/ispell altogether, but if there is no 'spell' USE var, then we should add '--without-ispell' to the configure. This also allows one to use EXTRA_ECONF="--with-ispell=/weird/path/to/ispell" in case ispell or aspell is located in a truly odd location where the configure script would be unlikely to find it. As with the previous patch, this one is against courier-0.52.2.ebuild.
Fixed in mail-mat/courier-0.53.2 as suggested here. Best regards, CHTEKK.
