If you install aspell using the default configuration prefix location
(i.e. /usr/local/), installing this package should be straightforward
and

    R CMD INSTALL Aspell

should work without any further concern.

If, on the other hand, you installed aspell into a different location
on your machine, you will need to tell the configuration script for
this package where to find aspell.h and libaspell.a or libaspell.so,
etc.  There is no problem installing aspell in a different location
and it is necessary if you do not have suitable permissions on the
machine to install things centrally for all accounts.

To avoid needing permissions, one might install the aspell library 
using

   ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local

to put things in the directory local/ under ones own account.
In this case, aspell.h will be installed into 

   $HOME/local/include

and libaspell will be placed in

   $HOME/local/lib

To allow the configuration script for the R package Aspell
to find these files,  the simplest thing to do is to 
specify the value of the prefix argument above
when using R CMD INSTALL

  R CMD INSTALL --configure-args=--with-aspell=$HOME/local Aspell

This adds include/ and lib/ to the prefix value and uses
these for searching for the header file and library respectively.

If you are doing this repeatedly and want to avoid specifying
the location on the command line of R CMD INSTALL, you can
set the environment variable ASPELL_HOME to the value 
given for the --prefix argument, e.g.

    setenv ASPELL_HOME $HOME/local

and then you can use

       R CMD INSTALL Aspell

as usual.



There may be occasions when you have install aspell.h in
one location and libaspell.so in a very different part of the 
file system.  In this case, specifying the locations
is not as simple as giving one directory and allowing the configuration
script to look in include/ and lib/.  Instead, you need to specify
the two directories explicitly.  Use the environment variables
ASPELL_INC_DIR and ASPELL_LIB_DIR for this, as in 

   setenv ASPELL_INC_DIR $HOME/local/include

   setenv ASPELL_LIB_DIR $HOME/local/lib

(Use the different syntax 

     export ASPELL_INC_DIR=$HOME/local/include 

if you use sh or Bash.)

The configuration script adds the -I and -L as appropriate.
If you need to do more, edit the Makevars.in file directly
and bypass the configuration setup.


Then
    R CMD INSTALL Aspell 

should work fine.

Please mail me if the configuration does not work or if you have
improvements to it.

 Duncan Temple Lang

duncan@wald.ucdavis.edu