Bug 144561 – OpenOffice spell checker disabled after 2.0.3 upgrade

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description Jared B. 2006-08-20 15:10:28 UTC]

Note: The following is a forum post I recently made that should fully describe the issue, as well as recommend a solution.  I'm copying it here because I feel that this is a bug that should be addressed.  Please also see this forum topic for more information:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-480941.html

OpenOffice used to handle spell checking without a problem on my system.  However, after upgrading to 2.0.3 it broke.  After going back and reviewing my log files I discovered that it does indeed print out an einfo message instructing users to "install the correct myspell package according to your language needs," but there are three big issues with that:

1) einfo messages scroll by with no warning whatsoever in a multi-package emerge.  I did not see this message after the upgrade, and I'm quite sure that I'm not the only one who missed it.

2) The given instructions, even if recognized and followed during the OpenOffice 2.0.3 installation, are useless.  It doesn't say anything about running eselect to actually set OpenOffice to use the new dictionary, and "eselect oodict set mypell-en" isn't exactly the kind of intuitive command that someone would just guess out of the blue.

3) This change completely removed significant functionality from OpenOffice, functionality that was automatically present in previous versions but now must be installed separately.  I don't think that moving spell checking to its own ebuild is necessarily a bad thing, but it should still be handled as part of the OpenOffice installation.  Eg, add a "spellcheck" USE flag, which can be used in conjunction with LINGUAS to automatically install and configure the dictionary if enabled.  If disabled, nothing happens, and the user can still manually install it after the fact.

I'm filing a bug report for this so that it will hopefully be better handled in future versions.

[Comment 1 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2006-08-20 23:14:02 UTC]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 139512 ***

[Comment 2 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2006-08-20 23:17:07 UTC]

(In reply to comment #0)
> 2) The given instructions, even if recognized and followed during the
> OpenOffice 2.0.3 installation, are useless.  It doesn't say anything about
> running eselect to actually set OpenOffice to use the new dictionary, and
> "eselect oodict set mypell-en" isn't exactly the kind of intuitive command that
> someone would just guess out of the blue.

This is simply not true at all, there's no need to run such thing. Read Bug 141260, Comment #3