[jsword-devel] Bundling JSword with FireBible

[Brian Fernandes]

Currently when you install FireBible you are expected to point it to a 
JSword installation on your system, the FireBible extension is small and 
does not include JSword.
When I submitted this for inclusion in the Firefox add-ons list, they 
told me that the whole installation process was just too complicated; 
besides the fact that you must have Java installed, you also need to 
download JSword, unzip, point to this location in FireBible. I can see 
their point, especially for non dev types. FireBible is currently listed 
(but hidden from most public) in their extension registry for this 
reason and I intend to correct this now, at least the JSword 
installation bit.

I intend to include the JSword binaries in the extension, but continue 
to give users the ability to specify an external JSword installation if 
they wish. This takes the extension size up from 300KB to nearly 4MB. 
But that is with JSword 1.6. With the latest nightly builds, the sizes 
of JARs are significantly higher and I have a few questions:

a) I assume a large number of fixes and enhancements (like faster/better 
searching) have been made since 1.6 and they are in the nightly builds. 
Does it make sense to include a nightly build in the extension or should 
I stick to 1.6 for now? Is there a more recent stable build that I could 
use?

b) In the nightly binary, there are multiple versions of Lucene - 2.9.1, 
3.0.2 and 3.0.3. Is this intentional or can I stick with Lucene 3.0.3?

c) I know the newest version of Lucene, Lucene 3, will not work with 
indices created with Lucene 1. Some time ago DM mentioned that the code 
to detect that the index present was a Lucene 1 index and thus invalid 
was not complete. Has any work been done on that front or will users 
still have to manually delete their indices?

d) What is lucene-smartcn? That JAR is 3.5MB in size and almost equals 
the size of all the other JARs that make up JSword. From what I could 
find online, it adds better Chinese indexing but I would like to avoid 
including this as it has a very significant impact on the size of the 
extension.
i) Will Lucene / JSword still work if this file is absent?
ii) If yes, will indexing of Chinenese modules be completely broken or 
just not as "smart" if I remove the library from the distribution?

Thanks,
Brian.