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

[DM Smith]

On Jan 10, 2010, at 5:08 PM, John Zaitseff wrote:

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 I have therefore packaged a newer version of the WEB module,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

mod2osis attempts to convert a source to osis from whatever format it is in. It does not do a very good job, except on OSIS. The round trip is not lossless unless the input was OSIS in the first place.

I haven't looked lately but the last time I did, WEB was in GBF.

The author maintains the source in GBF and has some tools to convert it to OSIS. However the OSIS that they produce is not very good.

CrossWire has a version in beta, but it has some problems that have prevented its release.

> 
> 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.

Use mod2imp to get the upstream source, not 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.

If they are built with osis2mod, they will be fully compatible with the SWORD library. If I'm not mistaken, BibleTime uses it's own custom render of OSIS and indeed might have problems. The OSIS renderers in the SWORD lib and osis2mod are kept in sync.


> 
> 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!

There is another solution: Get the source from ebible.org and write a conversion utility for it. Supply the input and the conversion to CrossWire. Or participate in the review of beta modules and encourage their release.

> 
> 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].

The reason for this urging is simple: The module is a transformed copy of the original. People were wanting the text to convert it into something else. Thus a transformed copy of a transformed copy. This does not encourage fidelity of the original source. Any fixes/improvements that we apply are not received downstream if the module is not directly used.

In some cases the original source no longer exists and there is no other original source. (By original source I'm referring to released work of the one who scanned or keyed the source.) In this case, text extraction of the module is the only way to get a starting point. Fixes and improvements to the results of mod2imp are welcomed, if no other original source can be found.

In the case of the WEB, this is not an issue as Michael Paul Johnson actively maintains it.

> 
>  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.

That aside, I think the proper linux way to distribute a modified work is to provide the original, the transformational scripting and a script to package it into the SWORD module format. Then during the packaging process the module could be built from original source.

> 
> 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
> 
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