[sword-devel] Making Import Easier

[Jonathan Morgan]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> Matthew Talbert wrote:
>
>> There is one serious advantage to adding import tools to a frontend
>> (ie, on Windows). There is a tremendous amount of content in ThML at
>> CCEL, but the licensing prohibits distributing said content. It's for
>> personal use only. The only formats that are re-distributable are the
>> plain-text documents. Adding this to a front-end would make it
>> trivially easy for a user to download a book from CCEL and add it to
>> his software.
>
> Ugh.  So software design considerations takes a back seat to someone else's
> peculiar licencing of one particular set of (admittedly useful) content?
>  The right way to go is to work with the content provider to fix the
> licencing, not work around it in your software, isn't it? Sounds like they
> could switch to a form of the Creative Commons licence with minimal impact
> on their business model.  I realize it might take real work (and some
> prayer!) to persuade them of the benefit to the community of doing this!
>
>> As to why the tools aren't distributed, for Xiphos (on Windows) it's
>> because the tools are around 20MB and a fairly strong element want to
>> keep the package download size as small as possible.
>
> Ouch!  On Ubuntu those tools occupy...
>
>  echo `dpkg -c libsword7_1.5.11-1~jmarsden2~intrepid_amd64.deb |grep
> /usr/bin/ |sed -e 's/ \+/ /g' |cut -d ' ' -f3` |sed -e 's/ /+/g' |bc -q
>  306944
>
> about 300K.  So Windows somehow bloats them by a factor of 66?  Can nothing
> be done to improve on that?

Static linking would at least partially explain it.  You are doing
dynamic linking, and are definitely not including the size of libsword
and friends that they link to.

BTW, when I installed it with default settings under MinGW (in the
sword-1.5.8 days with fewer command line programs) I was amazed to
find it taking 750MB! (IIRC).  Each executable was very large because
it had lots of library dragged in statically.

Jon