[Pkg-crosswire-devel] On 1.5.12 and our own Debian package repo (was: Re: Bibledit and Biblememorizer packages)

[Matthew Talbert]

> Since we are now getting somewhat official estimates of "several
> months"... OK, forget it, we'll have to stick with 1.5.11, or (more work
> for a considerably better end product!) 1.5.11 plus selected patches
> grabbed from the SWORD SVN to fix important bugs.  I just got the wrong
> idea about the imminence of 1.5.12, apparently... my mistake.
>
> Statements about "fixed in 1.5.12" are not going to be a lot of use to
> us at this point, they are too general; we'll need to dig into the SWORD
> SVN deep enough to know which commits fix which bugs... ugh.  Unpleasant
> but apparently necessary.
>
> If anyone has a list of the top ten or so important user-visible bugs in
> 1.5.11 that are "fixed in 1.5.12", that would be a start.  Bugs that
> cause crashes or break expected functionality would be high on my
> personal priority list.  Any volunteers who can make a start on this?
> Is there a way to use a SWORD bug tracker to look for bugs that were
> pegged as being high priority and which are closed as being "fixed in
> 1.5.12"??  If so, that might be a help in generating our "should fix in
> SWORD library packages" bug list.
>
> After we have a list of which bugs we want to see fixed in our packages,
> then we have to find the commits, and generate and test patches from
> those commits, and stick those patches into our sword library packaging
> and test the resulting libraries.  That's a *lot* of work caused by
> upstream inability or unwillingness to make a bugfix-only release, but
> that's life.  It's time to accept that reality and deal with its
> consequences.

Another frontend, BPBible, has released their own bugfix 1.5.12
version. It is essentially svn sword without the destructive changes,
and includes some additional patches as well. I have compiled Xiphos
against this, and it works well. Probably we shouldn't include patches
that haven't been officially accepted into sword yet, but those should
be easy to sort out. I would suggest using this as a starting point.
It is extremely likely that we will use this for Xiphos on Windows at
our next release if the next official sword release hasn't happened by
then. Due to some other shortcomings of sword on Windows, we are
already using a heavily patched version as it is. You can get this
version here: http://code.google.com/p/bpbible/downloads/list.

If you're interested, you can see the patches Xiphos made for Windows
here: http://code.google.com/p/xiphos-sword/ The primary purpose of
this was to solve some Unicode issues on NTFS filesystems; we
introduced a glib dependency in the process, which is not a long-term
solution.

The only other issue is to create some method to "fix" the personal
commentaries that were created before the patch. I don't understand it
nearly enough to know how to go about doing that.

> Meanwhile I've uploaded bibledit to mentors.debian.net and will do the
> same for biblememorizer shortly (God willing), and then let Roberto
> know, so he can sponsor them.  Once we've been through the process with
> those (smaller and hopefully easier) packages, we can look at doing
> something similar with sword and then bibletime and xiphos.

That sounds good,

Matthew