[pkg-crosswire-devel] Compiling modules from source

[Teus Benschop]

On Wed, 11 Nov 2020 at 22:24, Bastian Germann <bastiangermann at fishpost.de>
wrote:

> Am 11.11.20 um 14:03 schrieb Teus Benschop:
> > On Wed, 11 Nov 2020 at 13:56, Bastian Germann <
> bastiangermann at fishpost.de>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Am 11.11.20 um 13:46 schrieb Roberto C. Sánchez:
> >>> On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 01:43:12PM +0100, Bastian Germann wrote:
> >>>> One more thing about the sword modules in Debian: They are not
> actually
> >>>> built from source. Maybe this should be changed? I guess it would not
> be
> >>>> trivial to produce bit-by-bit identical modules to the ftp versions
> but
> >>>> maybe you have thoughts on this.
> >>>>
> >>> I ran into this about three years ago when I uploaded sword-comm-mhc
> >>> (the complete Matthew Henry commentary; we already have the concise
> >>> version in Debian).  In any event, the fact that the build "starts"
> with
> >>> what are effectively binary blobs was the principal objection of the
> FTP
> >>> Masters when they rejected sword-comm-mhc.
> >>>
> >>> It would be good if we could sort this out for the existing modules and
> >>> also so that we are able to get sword-comm-mhc into Debian.
> >>>
> >>> Regards,
> >>>
> >>> -Roberto
> >>>
> >>
> >> Okay. Is there any "official" place where the sources for the Crosswire
> >> modules are published? I only know of
> >> https://gitlab.com/crosswire-bible-society but that does not seem to be
> >> complete.
> >>
> >> For the WEB bible (ebible.org) the source is obvious and even signed.
> >>
> >> The locations of the source usually are listed in the .conf files in the
> > mods.d folder as listed in Salsa.
> >
> > Just checking on the KJV module configuration file at [1], there appear
> to
> > be multiple sources:
> >
> > TextSource=bf.org, eBible.org,
> https://sites.google.com/a/wmail.fi/greeknt/
> > home/greeknt, crosswire.org
> >
> > [1]
> >
> https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-crosswire-team/sword-text-kjv/-/blob/master/mods.d/kjv.conf
>
> The TextSource is not really helpful because it represents the raw
> sources for the OSIS file. But we need the URL for the OSIS file itself.
> I can find an OSIS archive for KJV at eBible.org. But that does not
> correspond to the 2.9 version that is on the Crosswire archive.
>
> I have implemented a build for OSIS files for sword-text-web. On the
> first try I have the New Testament building reproducibly. The Old
> Testament does not build reproducibly. I guess there is an issue with
> the apocrypha or it is just the compression that is a bit different.
> Maybe someone else wants to have a look.
>

My take on this would be that if it's harder to find out how exactly
upstream produced their modules, then let's keep things simple, and just
plainly copy the end product, that is, the sword modules, into the debian
packages. I am not going to spend the time on this issue where upstream
does not clearly indicate how they get from their sources to their
binaries. Perhaps someone who is interested in digging into this?