[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Packaging Sword modules

[Jordan Mantha]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 7:29 AM, Daniel Glassey <dglassey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

In Ichthux we packages up a lot of modules because we had the ability
to install sword modules as a part of the language selection at
install. This means that people around the world had the possibility
of having automatically localized Bible experiences. We thought that
would be a nice addition. We were also concerned about people without
internet connections so we wanted to have at least the basics on the
CD itself.

> 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.

I think the only really confusing part is if you install via a package
it doesn't show up as installed in the module managers, i.e. if I
install sword-text-kjv and then look in the module manager I don't see
KJV as installed. If we could somehow fix that I think it'd make mixed
distro/crosswire installation less confusing.

> 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.

If we're hosting .debs on crosswire.org why wouldn't we just put then
in Debian to start with?

> 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?

I think that was an original concern.

Overall I don't see why it should be an issue to package up sword
modules. IMO, the module packages should kept up-to-date as always and
like many other such module systems the packaged modules should show
up as "installed" in the application's module manager. Wouldn't that
basically resolve most of the issues?

I personally would rather use the Debian/Ubuntu archives to get my
modules but I realize that we can't package everything because of
copyright/license issues.

-Jordan