Comment 9 for bug 396322

1) The spell checker dialog itself works (including the popup list with selected dictionaries) once the preferences have been set for all 3 language choices - independent whether $(macport-prefix)/share/aspell and $(macports-prefix)/lib/aspell-0.60 can be found - i.e. the 'prefix' config option seems to be in effect here and the dicts included in the bundle are in use.

2) In the Preferences dialog for Spellcheck however the popup lists for language choices (main, lang2, lang3) are not filled with available dictionaries if the aspell directories in $(maports-prefix)/lib and $(macports-prefix)/share cannot be found. It looks like the 'prefix' config option is completely ignored for this part of the spellchecker implementation.

As far as I can see having gtkspell2 installed (and included by configure) doesn't make a difference. Sorry for the misleading assumption in comment 5.