[Pkg-crosswire-devel] On 1.5.12 and our own Debian package repo (was: Re: Bibledit and Biblememorizer packages)

[Jonathan Marsden]

Matthew Talbert wrote:

>> 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?

> There are many who would agree with that statement. However the
> official answer is that 1.5.12 will have alternate versification
> however long that takes.

Since we are now getting somewhat official estimates of "several
months"... OK, forget it, we'll have to stick with 1.5.11, or (more work
for a considerably better end product!) 1.5.11 plus selected patches
grabbed from the SWORD SVN to fix important bugs.  I just got the wrong
idea about the imminence of 1.5.12, apparently... my mistake.

Statements about "fixed in 1.5.12" are not going to be a lot of use to
us at this point, they are too general; we'll need to dig into the SWORD
SVN deep enough to know which commits fix which bugs... ugh.  Unpleasant
but apparently necessary.

If anyone has a list of the top ten or so important user-visible bugs in
1.5.11 that are "fixed in 1.5.12", that would be a start.  Bugs that
cause crashes or break expected functionality would be high on my
personal priority list.  Any volunteers who can make a start on this?
Is there a way to use a SWORD bug tracker to look for bugs that were
pegged as being high priority and which are closed as being "fixed in
1.5.12"??  If so, that might be a help in generating our "should fix in
SWORD library packages" bug list.

After we have a list of which bugs we want to see fixed in our packages,
then we have to find the commits, and generate and test patches from
those commits, and stick those patches into our sword library packaging
and test the resulting libraries.  That's a *lot* of work caused by
upstream inability or unwillingness to make a bugfix-only release, but
that's life.  It's time to accept that reality and deal with its
consequences.

>> 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).

> Yes, I'm satisfied as long as we can point people to somewhere with
> binary packages, although it would be preferable to get them into the
> distribution of course. For Xiphos with Ubuntu, the PPA has been
> working great. (thanks, Dmitry)

OK, that's good to know.  I can set up a repo for the Debian binaries if
necessary, or maybe we can use somewhere on the SWORD servers for that,
which would give the packages there some sense of being "official" for
users who might not know whether they can trust stuff from jmarsden.org
or whatever?

> If someone could help us setup a repo for Debian, that would be
> great. (If Launchpad would allow Debian packages, I think that would
> be the best)

It would, but I'm not sure how fast that support will be arriving.

Meanwhile I've uploaded bibledit to mentors.debian.net and will do the
same for biblememorizer shortly (God willing), and then let Roberto
know, so he can sponsor them.  Once we've been through the process with
those (smaller and hopefully easier) packages, we can look at doing
something similar with sword and then bibletime and xiphos.

Jonathan