[bt-devel] BibleTime: Which version of libsword is used?

[Jonathan Marsden]

Wolfgang Stradner E wrote:

> I mean in Kubuntu.
> So BibleTime 2 will use libsword7, right?

Eeli is a few minutes out of date :)

Hopefully libsword8.  I'll attempt a detailed explanation:

The 6/7/8 SONAME numbering scheme reflects backwards-incompatible API
changes in the SWORD library.  Each time we package a version of the
SWORD library that has a backwards-incompatible public API, we add one
to that number.

The official (old) SWORD and BibleTime packages now in Ubuntu use 6,
i.e. libsword6 is the package name in Ubuntu, including in Ubuntu
Jaunty.  For the last couple of months, the packaging team has been
using 7 (i.e. libsword7) for packaging SWORD 1.5.11.  There is a
libsword7 package in Debian experimental now, so this is in some sense
an officially accepted package (Debian experimental is of course not
exactly know for its stability and polish, but still, it is a decidedly
public repository, unlike my PPA).

It turns out that the SWORD 1.6.x release is backwards-incompatible with
 1.5.11, so we are *just* now (tonight) starting the creation of libsword8.

If a final SWORD 1.6.0 release appears reasonably soon, which everyone
is hoping will happen, then we expect to package that as libsword8, and
so our packages of BibleTime 2.0 (assuming it, too, is released soon)
are expected to depend on that.  It is important to realize that neither
SWORD 1.6.0 nor BibleTime 2.0 releases actually exist at all right now!

Right now, neither libsword7 nor BibleTime 2.0* are "in" Ubuntu, at all.
 There are only test versions packaged on my PPA and on the pkgcrosswire
team PPA.  So far, BibleTime 2.0~alpha3 packages have depended on libsword7.

The current BibleTime beta release which was released two days ago,
2.0~beta1, which I packaged just minutes ago (it isn't even in my
sword-developer-testing Launchpad PPA yet!) depends on libsword8.  And I
only finished uploading *that* to sword-developer-testing about 30
minutes ago, so it (including the shiny new libsword8) is still being
built in that PPA :)

Most likely, the only person in the world using libsword8 right now is
me... but we expect that to change!

If you want to be on the truly bleeding edge of SWORD and BibleTime
package testing, and you can afford the risk of breakage / bugs /
frustration that will mean, then you can look at and test packages in
https://launchpad.net/~jmarsden/+archive/sword-developer-testing and
also in https://launchpad.net/~pkgcrosswire/+archive/developer-testing
and let us know how well or badly they work for you.

SUMMARY: Nothing is yet certain about this, but the current plan /
expectation / hope is that the official BibleTime 2.0 packages for both
Ubuntu and Debian will use libsword8 packages of the SWORD library.

Jonathan