[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Bibledit and Biblememorizer packages

[DM Smith]

On Apr 1, 2009, at 1:59 AM, Matthew Talbert wrote:

>>> I don't think waiting on 1.5.12 is a good idea. Right now, Xiphos,
>>> BibleTime, and Bible Memorizer all work with 1.5.11.
>>
>> Well, yes and no -- there are open confirmed BibleTime bugs awaiting
>> fixes known to be in the SWORD subversion codebase.  Some of those  
>> bugs
>> are fairly significant, like making personal notes totally unusable  
>> on
>> 64bit Ubuntu.  Probably Xiphos is in a similar position.
>
> I don't think that is entirely the case. I believe the bug to be that
> if you copy the personal commentary from a 32 bit machine to 64 (or
> vice versa) they will no longer work correctly. At any rate, I don't
> mean to disagree that some fairly serious bugs have been fixed since
> 1.5.11.
>
>>> We may have to do some work with Xiphos to ensure full compatibility
>>> with 1.5.12, and I imagine the other programs would be in the same
>>> situation.
>>
>> Interesting; I thought I'd seen a post in sword-devel archives saying
>> all the known major apps that use SWORD now compile and link and  
>> "work"
>> against SWORD svn head?  Which, since there don't seem to be  
>> branches in
>> the SWORD svn, is presumably as close to "1.5.12" as anything  
>> currently
>> in existence.  Maybe there is a gap between "work" and "full  
>> compatibility".
>
> I routinely compile Xiphos against SWORD svn. It does compile, but
> currently there are some issues (eg, SWORD now takes the reference
> "isa 1" and sends you to 1 Samuel). Many of the revisions lately have
> broken functionality; though most have been fixed, I want to make sure
> that everything works as expected when we get closer to 1.5.12.
> Currently we have been given no sign of when we might expect a
> release.

This is a serious fundamental bug.

There is another very serious bug in 1.5.12 that needs to be fixed. It  
regards verse normalization. If the SWORD engine is asked to parse a  
verse reference that has a chapter number that is beyond the end of  
the book or a verse number that is beyond the end of the chapter, it  
will do one of two things:

If normalization is on (the default), it will go count ahead. So if  
John 88.1 is given, it will count ahead 88 chapters from the start of  
John and return the first verse. If John 1:999 is given it will give  
the 998-th verse beyond John 1.1. If that is outside of the Bible, it  
will return some hard-coded verse that is valid.

If normalization is off, it will return the reference as given. So  
Matt 888:999 will return (NT, Matt, 888, 999).

Right now, I'm seeing that with:
Normalization on, it constrains to the last valid reference in the  
same book/chapter. So John 3:888, results in the last verse of John 3.  
Personally, I like this change.

Normalization off, does not take. It is still normalization on.

There has been a patch submitted, but it only solves part of the  
problem. It does not work with bad range refs, e.g. John 66:77 - 88.

Another bug:
If I take a verse and make it persistent in the module and then give  
that verse a new reference to parse, it may not parse the reference.  
It works sometimes, but not others. Once it stops working, it stops  
altogether.

These bugs affect osis2mod, of which, I am the maintainer.

I think what is needed and perhaps it exists is a test case for  
expected verse parsing behavior.


>
>
>>> I think getting these programs and libsword 1.5.11 uploaded would be
>>> a very good thing.
>>
>> Can you elaborate on why that is so?  We could probably do it... but
>> we're years away from the next Debian release, and about four months
>> from the next Ubuntu release feature freeze.  So, unless 1.5.12 is  
>> going
>> to be delayed for several more months even under a "release early,
>> release often" SWORD policy, what is the benefit (and to whom) of our
>> packaging up everything for 1.5.11 now?  Won't we just end up redoing
>> and re-testing the packaging for 1.5.12 anyway in a few weeks or so?
>
> As I said, we have been given no promise as to when 1.5.12 will be
> released.

I don't see it happening soon. My guess is that it will be several  
months out. There is one set of changes I want to see in it and that  
is how osis2mod encodes interverse material. This is a significant  
change that has to have support in the SWORD library first. I'm ready  
to make the change to SVN, but I don't know how to make it in the  
SWORD library.


> In the meantime, I would personally like to see 1.5.11 and
> Xiphos 3.0.1 get into Debian.

I agree. Xiphos is so far superior to the version of GnomeSword that  
is currently in Debian that it should not wait.

I don't know about BibleTime, but I suspect that is the case too.


> I have already had to help some people
> get Xiphos compiled on Debian (using the Ubuntu source packages), so I
> would just like to be able to point them to binaries. 1.5.11 and
> Xiphos 3 are a *huge* improvement over what is in the repos. So I
> guess my reasons are selfish; I'm not familiar with Debian so it's
> hard for me to support it. In addition, while Xiphos 3.0.1 *should*
> compile against 1.5.12 and work reasonably well, I can't guarantee it
> at this point, and we may be a couple of months away from another
> release. Perhaps I'm being over-cautious, but I was a little
> disappointed that we didn't make it into Jaunty, and would feel better
> if we could at least get these current packages in.