[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Module packaging, distribution, and management

[Jonathan Marsden]

Matthew Talbert wrote:

> Indexing only needs to be done once, unless of course, an updated
> module is released. It would suit me very well to have this done via
> the packaging system at install time.

This is a minor tweak to module2deb, now we are clear that mkfastmod can
do the (correct) index generation; stay tuned :)

> I cannot see any circumstance where user contributed modules would be
> created or maintained anywhere other than ~/.sword.

I can :)

Well, hypothetically at least, you could have a web site that people can
upload contributed modules to, that validates them, converts them to
.deb packages, and stick them in a package repository, all 100%
automatically (or with a human module checker in the path, if desired,
of course).  This could actually be a nice facility for CrossWire to
offer, at some point, if they so choose.  Basically a (packaged) module
publishing facility.  You could make this package repository be distinct
from the one holding "official" CrossWire modules, if that distnction
were important to maintain.  You could autogenerate RPM-packaged modules
in a simlar fashion for a parallel Fedora repo, etc. (I can dream!)

On Debian/Ubuntu, if some front end package, or even libswordN itself,
were to add this package repository, perhaps by creating a file called
say /etc/apt/sources.d/crosswire-usercontributed.list ... well, you'd
get fully integrated package management of (packaged) user contributed
modules!  (I do not know of any packages that currently drop files into
/etc/apt/sources.d/ like this ... but the capability exists).

Whether anyone but me thinks this sort of full integration could have
any value for the module user community is a different question, of
course!  I just want to point out that the toolset is now coming
together to make this kind of thing entirely practical, should someone
decide that they want to attempt it :)

Jonathan