[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Packaging Sword modules

[Daniel Glassey]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Jonathan Morgan <jonmmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Before thinking about packaging Sword modules, I think we need
> understanding of why more core developers (including myself) tend not
> to favour it.  Feel free to comment or add to them (or counter them).
> Some of these reasons have already been mentioned, but here are my
> reasons.
[imho many good reasons]

Thanks Jonathan,

The history behind the packaging of modules was that when the
packaging was started there was no such thing as installmgr or the
frontend module installers. Users had to go to crosswire.org, find the
zip they wanted, and extract in the right place.

There was also the little matter of one of the frontends crashing if
you didn't have at least 1 bible, 1 commentary and 1 lex-dict!

So I attempted to package a fairly minimal set. Folks in Ubuntu have
taken a different view since then which I would like to hear :)

I think the ability to package modules will be useful for custom
distros like Ubuntu CE or Ichthux but personally I don't think it is
appropriate to have the packages themselves in distros now.

I think the fact that we can't package all the modules would really
confuse users. I agree that it's important that users have the full
choice.

An alternative to packaging them in the distros is to distribute
packages from crosswire.org.
I, er, did try something like that before ages ago - creating a script
that would run in a cron job and create all the modules on the server
- but crosswire.org was a Red Hat machine (now Fedora) and creating
debian packages meant building and installing stuff locally which
wasn't maintainable.
If it is easier to build debs on Fedora now then I think that would be
the place to host them rather than inside Ubuntu and Debian.
Another way to host them on crosswire.org would be to automatically
build newly detected versions offsite on a deb system and upload them
back to crosswire.org - as long as that could be done securely.
This would be to give users a choice - add a package repo and install
them to system through the system package manager to /usr/share/sword,
or to use the frontends to install to ~/.sword or
/usr/local/share/sword.

Distros aren't just targeted to single users but should be useable on
multi-user systems as well, whether family, school, bible college or
whatever. So we need to take that into account whether or not it's the
primary target.

I would guess most users won't be using apt-get - they'll be using the
graphical package manager which is a very different experience from
installmgr.

Another use case for (imho a minimal set of) packaged modules is when
you get a distro CD/DVD with a sword frontend on it and aren't online
- what should you do?

Thanks,
Daniel