[sword-devel] intro & rpm spec file

[Michael A. Peters]

I'd like to introduce myself.

My name is Michael Peters - I've been using Linux since 98 (MKLinux DR3)
an as my primary desktop shortly after I discover the joy of GNU and
free software.

I'm not a C/C++ programmer (I have done some python and perl, I've
contributed to webmin - though not in a while) but I'm quite good with
the rpm package management system, and use to build rpm's for a living
before the dot.com bust.

Other than debian (which doesn't use rpm) I haven't found any distro's
myself that come with sword already packaged, and I may be able to help
in that respect.

-=-
There is an rpm spec file the sword source tarball, but it is broken.

Attached is a spec file I wrote that works very well.
It has been tested on Fedora Core 2 Test 2 - and on my LFS system - but
it should work on any semi-current distribution. I'll test it on FC1 and
on Mandrake 10 later.

Having a working spec file in the src tarball is beneficial, as people
with rpm systems can build an rpm really easily then -

rpmbuild -tb sword-vers.tar.gz
-=-
I'm also willing to work on a shell script to easily generate rpm's for
the individual modules. The only "gotcha" I can see with that is that
some modules include documentation within them (such as bhs which has an
sgml licence file and webstersdict which contains a text license file)
that should probably be packaged with the %doc macro for rpm's - but it
shouldn't be too hard to figure that out and automate that as well.

The spec files can probably be generated from the same info the websites
ModInfo.jsp uses to generate the module info pages.

The idea of packaging the modules in rpm is that it would make them
painlessly easy to install, and a yum/apt repository could be used to
allow even easier installation and update of modules as needed.

Is this something that would be of interest?

-- 
Cheap Linux CD's - http://mpeters.us/linux/