[sword-devel] Module making

[Greg Hellings]

Greetings

On 12/7/06, DM Smith <dmsmith555 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> David & Maribel,
>
> 	Only partial answers as I have little experience with vpl2mod or
> imp2mod.
>
> In His Service,
> 	DM Smith
>
> On Dec 7, 2006, at 2:44 AM, David Bell wrote:
>
> > Greetings to all!
> >
> > This is my first time to post, but I think that I have read enough
> > of the archive to avoid repeating the same "newbie" posts. But I
> > want to thank everyone for their patience anyway!
> >
> > I would like to make modules for Sword. In fact, I have already
> > built some modules, but it has been a rather painful experience.
> > This is true for several reasons. Probably the biggest is that I am
> > working on a Mac (PPC). Therefore, I have had to either work
> > through emulation (windows) or actually work on a Ubuntu box at
> > work. But even then I have had major problems. I have read through
> > the module making guide many times and still am not sure why
> > sometimes I can't get a file to run. So, I have several questions
> > to throw out.
> >
> > 1. Within the MacSword project (great to see interest in MacSword--
> > it's a great project!) are there native tools that would handle
> > imp2mod or vpl2mod? Or do we all have to use the win32 tools?
>
> The tools should be able to be built on a Mac. You will need to
> obtain and install icu and lucene. Since Mac OSX is a version of Unix
> and has GNU's compilers, you can follow any of the discussions on
> this mailing list on how to build them.

As of this past summer, DM's statement was tried and true.  I was able
to build both the latest stable as well as the svn versions of sword
by just popping into a terminal window and running ./usrinst.sh with
make and make install (I tried it both with the .sh wrapper and the
./configure directly - both worked fine).

>
> >
> > 2. Has anyone ever thought of putting together a disk image of a
> > basic *nix system that could be used with emulation (Q) on
> > different platforms (especially MacOS PPC) to build modules? This
> > disk would contain all of the necessary files to make sure all of
> > the win32 binaries run and do their thing.
>
> I don't know if this has come up before. The intention is that the
> Sword engine and utilities can be built on Mac. If someone were to
> build them as universal binaries, we'd be glad to host them.

What do you mean here?  When you are asking for a disk image, are you
talking some sort of iso to burn onto a CD that could be used to run a
whole emulated operating system?  Basically a LiveCD that would come
equipped with all of the sword libraries pre-compiled?  I believe
there are already projects out like that.  I remember talk about
something named Ichthus or something along those lines.  You might
want to look into that.

>
> >
> > 3. I saw a rather extensive discussion from a few years back in the
> > archives about making the imp2mod and vpl2mod a bit more user
> > friendly by having them tell you what went wrong in the process.
> > Has anyone ever taken that on? I for one would have loved to have
> > that kind of feedback. It would be great to know why the program
> > generated empty files (nt ot) or minimal files (nt.vss ot.vss). One
> > text that I was working on apparently had trouble with vpl2mod
> > because it marked the Psalm titles as Psalm *:0.
>
> OSIS is the format we recommend. As such, our efforts have been
> focused on improving osis2mod. It can handle Bibles and verse based
> Commentaries. It has pretty good diagnostics.
>
> >
> > 4. When you run the vpl2mod empty, it gives you some instructions.
> > These instructions seem to imply that if you have verse numbers
> > starting each line, you can have any number of verses. And yet
> > (unless I made a mistake) when I tried with a test file of Genesis
> > 1, the module would not generate. Does the text file have to have
> > all the verses of the Bible to run or at least all of the NT?

I thought I remembered comments along the lines that you must have all
of the verses if you're using vpl2mod.  Otherwise you need to use
imp2mod or something else like that.  Perhaps I'm mistaken?

> >
> > David & Maribel
> > david.bell at bluebottle.com
> > parati semper en MMVI dare omni rationem de ea quae en me est spe
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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>
>
>

Happy hunting!

--Greg