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

[Dmitrijs Ledkovs]

2010/1/11 John Zaitseff <J.Zaitseff at zap.org.au>:
> 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! :-)
>

That was/is part of the plan....... but didn't happen yet.

>> > I have therefore packaged a newer version of the WEB module,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.
>

No, it's a binary blob that I cannot modify, apply patches and learn
from. If I want to create a new sword-text I want to do $apt
get-source sword-text* and look at the sources and learn how I can
write a new module from scratch.

> 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.
>

Running osis2mod and mod2osis do not get you back to original osis
file. This process is not 100% reversible a known upstream
feature/bug. Hence we can't get pristine/original sources back using
mod2osis.

> 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.
>

Final packages will be compatible with CrossWire modules because all
the util functions to produce a CrossWire module are available in
Debian. And using the same conf file will create compatible modules
with CrossWire modules.

Plus bugs are constantly fixed in osis2mod and modules as uploaded by
maintainers potentially use any svn revision of osis2mod with any
patches applied. So no we will not be able to produce 100% identical
modules. But yes we can produce compatible once.


> 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!
>

Well I don't like this solution either. I believe sword-texts should
be available in the archive.

But on the other hand all sword front-ends (Xiphos, Bibletime etc)
currently provide module installation facilities.

Upstream was quite hostile of packaging sword modules in Debian.

If you browse launchpad there is code to generate modules for all
public domain crosswire modules.

> 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
>

see reasons above.

> 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.
>

Not retriviable (loss of information). There are no other tools apart
from libsword in Debian which can read it. The format is not
documented.

> 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/
>                                      v
>


-- 
With best regards


Dmitrijs Ledkovs (for short Dima),
Ледков Дмитрий Юрьевич

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