RE: No such program, egrep error in Customize

[Drew Adams]

> > Still, the error message is perhaps a bit strange. ispell is
> > apparently used for completion of strings, but if ispell is
> > not installed, then that's not TRT.
>
> No, ispell (the program) is not used for completion.  Instead, you
> will see that ispell.el invokes the program that is the value of
> ispell-grep-command directly, as this backtrace you posted clearly
> shows:
>
>   ispell-call-process("egrep" nil t nil "-i" "^blu.*$" "/usr/dict/words")
>
> (`ispell-call-process' is a simple wrapper for call-process-region, it
> does NOT invoke ispell the program.)

Thanks for the clarification. Let me rephrase it then. The code that calls
ispell-call-process with "egrep", or some higher-level code, should perhaps
provide a better error message for a Customize user.

And see my other mail. It is better for such a failure to find egrep not to
raise an error and instead call some default text-completion function.

There are perhaps other, and better ways to handle this, but I don't think
the current approach is very user-friendly, in any case. Especially for a
Customize user. At the limit, it is better to punt and say completion is not
available than to send the user googling to figure out what egrep and
ispell-call-process might be all about.