[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Packaging SWIG bindings for Ubuntu

[Jonathan Morgan]

Months ago, in the early discussion of the packaging project, there
was talk of packaging some of the SWIG bindings for SWORD, but it has
not yet happened.  I was interested in trying BPBible on the Karmic
beta, so I built it with the new packages.  A few comments:
1. Configure for the Python bindings fails because it cannot find
libsword.  It is looking for libsword.so, but only libsword.so.8 and
libsword.so.8.0.0 are installed.  I added a symbolic link from
libsword.so to libsword.so.8.0.0 and it then built fine.  Is this a
problem?  I think from memory that the standard Sword install is just
libsword.so (and yes, I do know the purpose of versioning the
libraries).
2. BPBible also requires PyStemmer.  This builds fine with
easy_install, and as far as I could tell is not packaged.
3. I didn't try building any of the other bindings, but I imagine each
language would be packaged differently since it would depend on
different runtime environments, etc.
4. BPBible runs fine from source if the Python bindings, wxPython and
PyStemmer are installed (though it also needs a correctly configured
paths.ini file to work properly).

Is anyone interested in packaging python-sword bindings?  I might give
it a try, but I don't want to tread on anyone's toes.

Jon