[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Packaging Sword modules

[Peter von Kaehne]

> Speaking officially for CrossWire community, this is how we want it. We 
> do not want the modules to be distributed in another fashion. Please 
> honor our wishes.
> 

I guess that sums it up.

Following being told that it is against Debian's policy to not package
modules I looked up Debian's and Ubuntu's policy books. Both are silent
on the matter.

I then emailed the Debian policy mailing list. The list also remained
silent. I got a single personal response by someone who said he did not
speak for Debian, but only for himself.

The sum total of his email was that it would be nice for any kind of
document processing/viewing programmes to have something in the
repositories that could be installed and Debian is not too keen to have
things which are  useless without external material. That clearly does
not amount to policy.

But even if it did it would not affect CrossWire's + associates' lot: As
it stands between bibledit's sword export,  Gnomesword's prayer lists,
BT and GS's personal commentary and the sword commandline tools the
programmes are in essentially the same position as a word processor -
even if nothing is distributed along with it, a user could theoretically
(or practically) create their own content. Hence the need to distribute
anything along with it for policy reasons does not exist.

So it boils down to

a) are there any use cases for module distribution in deb form which can
not be satisfied by distribution of relevant modules in other form?

b) if there are no such use cases, are there any reasons beyond "We
can", why the modules should be debbed up?

Wrt a) nothing convincing has been told. A CD distribution of e.g.
Ubuntu CE could perceivably come along with a module repository - no
need for it to be debbed up. The module manager is well quipped to
install from CD. Scripting a locale sensitive selection of modules is
equally possible from both sources (debs or zipped modules). Finally, a
person who carries around Ubuntu CE CDs can also carry around SWORD CDs.

Wrt b) no reasons beyond "we can" and "look what a cool tool we have"
have been stated so far. So it boils down to a "because we can". Yes you
can. But we ask you not to for reasons we have adequately explained. End
of story really. Do you respect our wishes or do you wish to go your own
way?

Peter