[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Bibledit and Biblememorizer packages

[Jonathan Marsden]

Matthew Talbert wrote:

> 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.

See
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1255685&group_id=954&atid=100954
and
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1611953&group_id=954&atid=100954

I have personally verified both of these (they may have the same root
cause?) using SWORD 1.5.11, on straight 64bit, no copying files from
32bit to 64bit systems involved.

> 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.

I took the formal release of a bible module (Elzevir) that was tagged as
needing 1.5.12 as meaning we were close, since there would be no point
taking such a module out of beta otherwise.  That module was
subsequently edited to require 1.5.11 after I asked about it and pointed
out the warnings it generates when scanning the repository from BibleTime.

Overall trying to make 1.5.12 both a "lots of bugfixes" and a "new
alternate versification" release may be asking too much of a single release?

> As I said, we have been given no promise as to when 1.5.12 will be
> released. In the meantime, I would personally like to see 1.5.11 and
> Xiphos 3.0.1 get into Debian. 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.

You could do that with the equivalent of the binaries in pkgcrosswire's
team PPA, or some similar Debian-focused private distribution
repository.  I'm starting to point Ubuntu folks to my own PPA for
BibleTime, though I should switch to the pkgcrosswire PPA instead really.

I've left Xiphos to Dmitry, based more on historical accident than
anything else (I run GNOME here, not KDE!), but at the time, that seemed
a reasonable way to divide up the packaging work for the "big"
applications.  As a result, I've personally become slowly more involved
in BibleTime rather than Xiphos.

> So I guess my reasons are selfish; I'm not familiar with Debian so
> it's hard for me to support it.

Which is fair enough, especially if others are in the same position.
Although getting packages into Debian unstable only helps if you are
supporting users who are knowledgeable enough to run an unstable
release... in which case they are presumably knowledgeable enough to
also add a private repository containing updated SWORD/Xiphos/etc packages?

In other words, we could get to the relative ease of installation by:

 1. Add two lines to a sources.list file
 2. apt-get update
 3. apt-get install xiphos

without actually having packages in Debian or Ubuntu.  AFAIK we are
basically at this point now, at least for BibleTime (I've not tried it
for Xiphos, hoping Dmitry was running with that one).

> ... 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.

I was disappointed too, but, well, we didn't make it.  This sounds as
though you are now suggesting a strategy (at least for Debian) closer to
use of a private repository rather than waiting for the next official
Debian release?  My mental model ties packaging for a given distro to
that distro's release timetable... but maybe Debian doesn't necessarily
fit that model?

Jonathan