[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Please update the World English Bible module to version 1.8

[John Zaitseff]

Dear Dmitrijs et al.,

> > I sent an e-mail to the Debian bug tracker about a new version
> > of the World English Bible (WEB) module almost three years ago.
> > Unfortunately, no one seems to have done anything about it.
>
> pkgcrosswire team has been started after that.

Well, if the team picks up this package, all to the good! :-)

> > I have therefore packaged a newer version of the WEB module,
> > version 1.8, and placed it on the ZAP Group package repository.
> > Could you (or someone else) please take this and incorporate it
> > into an official Debian package?
>
> Well your packaging simply installs binary blobs.  Quite a few
> sword-text-* packages do that.  I believe this fails DFSG-
> freeness.  As change-log suggests the source for this module is
> OSIS, hence the deb package must be build from OSIS (converted to
> a module).
>
> For this package to be included in Debian Main please release orig
> tarball with sources (OSIS) and create a debian package which
> builds crosswire module and installs it.

This is a problem indeed: the reason the sword-text-* packages
install what look like binary blobs is that the original upstream
packages (from http://www.crosswire.org/sword/modules/) are in that
format; they are NOT in OSIS (or GBS/VS/VPL/TEI) format.  You are,
no doubt, acutely aware of this, so this is just for the record.

As I see it, there are four possible solutions:

1. Continue the status quo.  The data can be extracted at any time
   by running the mod2osis(1) tool in the libsword8 (sword) package.
   You therefore could argue that the module format is simply a
   compressed version of the data, since running osis2mod(1), then
   mod2osis(1), is lossless---at least, that is the goal of the
   upstream sword library.

2. Download the relevant package from www.crosswire.org, then run
   mod2osis on the data manually to create a "pseudo-upstream"
   source.  I don't really see any benefit of doing this, although
   it does allow the final package to be compatible with the
   upstream CrossWire one.

3. Go further upstream, directly to the OSIS/GBS/TEI source (or USFX
   in the case of the World English Bible), bypassing CrossWire
   altogether.  This almost certainly means the final packages will
   NOT be compatible with the CrossWire modules, which could be a
   problem with programs like BibleTime.

4. Give up packaging CrossWire modules entirely, and hope that the
   end user will do it himself or herself.  BibleTime, for example,
   makes this somewhat easier to do.  Needless to say, I don't like
   this solution at all!

One further wrinkle, again for the record, is the FAQ on this very
question from CrossWire:

  How do I convert Sword modules to text?

  We would like to discourage this.  Please work with us in making
  our software better.  But, if you really need the text, each
  module has a conf file which will tell you about the origin of the
  text.  Please obtain the source the same way we did.  You may not
  convert the modules that have been licensed to CrossWire for
  distribution.  The KJV module is the only one for which we
  maintain the source, which you can obtain [here].

  http://www.crosswire.org/index.jsp?section=FAQ#How_do_I_convert_Sword_modules_to_text.3F

I'm hoping that solution 1 will prevail: yes, the data is in
compressed and processed format, but it is trivially retrievable
using the mod2osis(1) utility program.

Yours truly,

John Zaitseff

-- 
John Zaitseff                    ,--_|\    The ZAP Group
Phone:  +61 2 9643 7737         /      \   Sydney, Australia
E-mail: J.Zaitseff at zap.org.au   \_,--._*   http://www.zap.org.au/
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