[Pkg-crosswire-devel] libsword6 and libsword7 in peaceful coexistence... only if we separate out the utilities

[Jonathan Marsden]

I thought I should test my hypothesis that libsword6 and libsword7
should be able to coexist on the same machine.

Um.  Well... they don't!  But the issue is not the libraries, it is the
surrounding utility programs that are included in these packages that
conflict.

I suspect the right solution going forward is to package the utilities
independently from the library itself.  In reality most users of
libsword6 or libsword7 will never use or care about tools like imp2vs or
mod2osis anyway, and logically these tools are not part of the library,
they are mostly specialist tools intended for use by module developers
(at least from what I have figured out about them so far!).

Should we be creating libsword7 with *just* the library, and a new
binary package libsword-tools or libsword-utils with all the module
converter tools in it?  That would allow library coexistence.  Module
developers are likely to want to use the latest set of tools, not be
developing new modules using an old library, I would guess, so not
allowing multiple sets of the tools to coexist is probably OK?

How do we handle tools currently installed by libsword7 that *are* in
fact somewhat general purpose end user tools... I think installmgr
qualifies as such?  Do we need to do something like install as
installmgr6 and installmgr7 and use the alternatives subsystem so that
people can pick which set of the tools they want active at a give time?
 Is that overkill?  Do real end users actually use installmgr?  Is it
exec'ed from any of the front-end packages, or do they do their own thing?

Creating a new libsword-tools binary package isn't hard to do,
obviously, but I'm not going to do it unilaterally... your thoughts and
comments, please, team!  For example, could/should we put the tools into
libsword-dev instead, rather than create a new binary libsword-tools
package?  Or is there a better way entirely, that allows multiple sword
library versions to coexist?

Jonathan