Removing --disable-aspell explicitly adds a dependency to the aspell and friends, that means everyone using contrib/pidgin would have to install aspell. I guess we could patch configure to silently determine if dictionary support should be included or not. But this kind of decisions should be made by the user imho.
Normally the configure script would detect and enable features if available, this should be reported as a bug upstream. You could also detect if aspell is installed or not, and provide --disable- aspell if its not, for example: ... build() { # Detect if aspell is available if [ -f /usr/include/aspell.h ]; then aspell=y else aspell=n fi cd $name-$version ./configure \ --prefix=/usr \ "$([ $aspell = y ] || echo --disable-aspell)" ... I noticed you forcefully disable other things that are correctly detected and enabled by the configure script, such as meanwhile. This is in fact the reason why I created my own port for pidgin. Regards, Alan