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

[Jonathan Morgan]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 3:46 AM, Peter von Kaehne <refdoc at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>>>> It is not data like a game episode (a la Wesnoth).
>>
>>>> libsword itself is perfectly usable without one of the modules.
>>
>>> Yes.  In the same way, a desktop PC is perfectly usable without a screen
>>> or keyboard or mouse (you can use it via the serial port or USB port, or
>>> as a headless server across a network.  But very few PCs are used that way!
>>
>>>> For example, you could use it for research purposes with modules you
>>>> build entirely yourself (and some do use it this way). So, it would
>>>> be more reasonable to recommend a Bible for the frontends rather than
>>>> the library, in my opinion.
>
> Or you could simply choose to install modules which are never going to
> be available in Debian. Including licence reasons. As a Farsi user there
> are no PD files for me.
>
>>>> 1. Would it be possible to distribute the lucene indexes as part of
>>>> the package? This is an area of potential issues, because if modules
>>>> are in write-protected areas then GnomeSword will not be able to
>>>> create an index without being run as root. In my opinion, the indexes
>>>> are a valid part of the data (for some reason, the official Sword
>>>> position does not agree, though I've never heard a good explanation).
>>
>>> That sounds almost reasonable to me.  Perhaps better would be for the
>>> packages to run a post-install script that builds those indexes, so we
>>> aren't transporting the (in some sense redundant, becase it is readily
>>> computable from the base modules) index data around on limited bandwidth
>>> links etc.  That is very doable, as long as there is a command-line tool
>>> which will build them.  We'd package that separately from the libraries
>>> (so libs of different versions can coexist, per my other thread), I'd
>>> think, and the modules would depend on it so they could be sure it was
>>> available for their postinstall script to use.
>>
>> The index data is for general books around 100KB, for dictionaries
>> around 1MB, and for Bibles between 3MB and 7MB. I don't have a
>> preference whether it is distributed or done post-install, but I don't
>> think that bandwidth is a huge concern in this case.
>
> I would think that module files growing from 2mb (a complete bible) to
> something like 9-10mb is a bandwith concern.
>
> Please also do not forget that jsword and sword use different
> implementations for lucene.
>
> I am not aware of the exact details but my understanding is that the
> differences are significant.
>
> In consequence, if we ever want to package jsword (and why not since
> Java has gone the F/LOSS way?) and Bibledesktop or Kiyut, we would have
> to distribute module files with two kind of indeces.

Just for the record, BPBible uses a different index format again.

Jon