[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Updated bibledit packaging for Debian/Ubuntu

[Jonathan Marsden]

A small team has assembled to help the crosswire.org developers get the
SWORD libraries and their associated packages in Debian and Ubuntu
updated.  A short term goal for us is to get these into Ubuntu Jaunty,
which means we have a 19 Feb deadline for 100% finished packages.

In the process, someone suggested we also update the bibledit package,
and "adopt" it.  The web page at
http://www.nongnu.org/bibledit/development.html#helpneeded also suggests
that bibledit packaging help is "needed".

So, I've just done that!  There is now a (slightly rough, see below)
Ubuntu package of Bibledit 3.5 in my Ubuntu PPA.  Soon it will be in our
team PPA on launchpad.net, too.  With a trivial change to its changelog
for package and release naming, it should build fine on Debian too.

In this process, I found a few things for which some minor help from
bibledit developers could be handy:

(1) The bibledit-* programs lack man pages -- is what they do documented
in some other form, so that we can create man pages for each one?

(2) FSF address: In many of the files in the bibledit-3.5.tar.gz
tarball, the FSF address in the copyright statement is an old one.  A quick:

 tar zxf bibledit-3.5.tar.gz
 cd bibledit-3.5
 find . -type f | xargs grep -l "59 Temple Place" | \
   xargs sed -i 's/59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA
02111-1307,/51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301/'

fixes this for all the GPL licence statements in the code.

It might be good for someone with commit access to the bibledit version
control system to make such a change there, also.  We will probably just
patch these in our source package of bibledit-3.5, but longer term it
would of course be nice for us to have them fixed in the original source
tree so such a patch is no longer needed.

(3) According to licencecheck, a very few bibledit 3.5 source files are
not actually GPL licenced, despite what the man page says.  These are:

  olpc/activity.py: *No copyright* UNKNOWN
  scripts/usfm2osis.pl: BSD (3 clause)
  src/ustring.cpp: LGPL (v3 or later) (with incorrect FSF address)
  src/rc4.c: BSD (3 clause)
  src/myfnmatch.c: LGPL (v3 or later)

Adding an appropriate copyright statement to activity.py would be really
useful to us so we can get this updated package readily accepted into
Debian and Ubuntu; can you confirm what its copyright status is, please?

The others are fine, we can document their individual copyrights in
debian/copyright for the package.  Apparently ustring.cpp has an even
*older* incorrect FSF address, which should also be corrected.

That's it!  We hope this is useful.  And thanks for bibledit!

Jonathan