[Pkg-crosswire-devel] links to modules was Re: Debconf question to install modules and other ideas

[Matthew Talbert]

> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 6:51 AM, Eeli Kaikkonen
> <eekaikko at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:
>> Quoting Daniel Glassey <dglassey at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> The other idea is for ~/.sword to be created with soft links to
>>> modules in /usr/share/sword and /usr/local/share/sword. Then a user
>>> can 'delete' the module from there without having to go near apt. The
>>> library will need to ignore the system directories and only see the
>>> home dir plus any other custom dirs.
>>>
>> I don't like this idea because it alters the old behaviour. I have
>> used both /usr/share/sword and ~/.sword and would hate if after
>> updating the distro the modules would be messed up.
>
> We'd have to make sure that old behaviour was maintained and worked as
> expected after an upgrade.
>
> I'd expect that modules would be installed with app module manager to
> ~/.sword and those would be the real files. They would be preferred to
> the soft linked system modules.
>
> I mean that the order of preference is:
> ~/.sword
> then /usr/local/share/sword
> then /usr/share/sword
>
> I'm not sure where custom module paths would fit in. I'd guess using
> the current system either below or above ~/.sword.
>
> So the proposed new linking system would only link in files that don't
> already exist in ~/.sword
>
> Does that make sense? Is that roughly how it currently is?
>
> Regards,
> Daniel
>

I think this entire suggestion is pretty good, but there are still some issues.

If modules are in /usr/share/sword and /etc/sword.conf still lists
/usr/share/sword for the data path, then if modules are unlinked from
~/.sword, they will still be available so they won't appear "deleted"
for the user. One possible solution to this would be to leave
/usr/share/sword out of sword.conf and list /usr/local/share/sword
instead. This would be my preference because I'm fairly sure that
GnomeSword would behave well with this method. If
/usr/local/share/sword happened to be writable, then GS could install
there, otherwise it would install in ~/.sword. I'm not the most
familiar with how linking works, but I think the module manager would
be able to delete and index modules linked from /usr/share/sword to
~/.sword.

Custom module paths can be used by defining SWORD_PATH which I believe
would override what is listed in /etc/sword.conf. In addition,
according to the documentation, extra paths can be added to
/etc/sword.conf for custom module paths. However, this I can't
guarantee will work in any logical fashion in GnomeSword.

Matthew