[sword-devel] Debian and Ubuntu packages

[Peter von Kaehne]

Dear All,

As all of you know the Debian and Ubuntu packages are way out of date,
and are falling behind more and more. To a degree this is mitigated by
DomCox's packages, but in the end it hurts the project as it gives
exposre to old stuff.

I have therefore tried to get to the bottom of this and how best to
resolve it.

Dan Glassey who is on Sword mailing list is listed as the Debian
maintainer. Ubuntu lists him also as their maintainer, but that is
erroneous. A email from him to me stated that he is not the Ubuntu
maintainer and  that he is under a lot of pressure hence unable to do
much wrt Debian either. Follow up emails have not resulted in responses,
so I guess the pressue is still on.

Ubuntu gets it  SWORD related packages via Debian as no one among
Ubuntu's own maintainers has taken up the challenge.  A mail to the
ubuntu motu list has brought about a couple of volunteers from them, so
that might change. Should we acquire a Ubuntu MOTU maintainer, then we
would be able to feed up to date packages into Ubuntu - irrespective of
what happens in Debian.

The current deadline for package freeze is 19th February (Ubuntu 9.04)

Not sure if anyone can manage this.It would be nice though. There are a
fair number of volunteers there from their side.

The alternative is to get them again updated into Debian and then see
them trickling down.

That aside several points were raised in responses I got and I thought I
should share them here:

1) Diatheke - we should rebadge the CGI scripts as "examples" or remove
them due to the security issues associated with them.

2) libsword - one Ubuntu MOTU complained that we do not publish a
detailed list of API changes (vs general bug fixes) from version to
version. At least he could not find it. I guess this is a fair point.

3) dependencies - I think we need to do some work on convincing them
that our modules should be classified as e-books (and subsequently not
packaged) rather than as "updates" or "plugins" and hence packaged.
Otherwise they will continue to package bibles etc.

4) GUI module manager - one of the results of them packaging modules is
that our GUI module managers in BT and GS can not remove packages. A
suggestion raised (and a good one in my view) was that the package
manager could check if privileges for writing are there for a particular
location and if not seek authentication via + use sudo. In my view this
is desirable.

I have bcc'ed my correspondents + volunteer aspirants among the Ubuntu
lot and hope that some will join this thread on the mailing list + we
can get the ball rolling again.

Yours

Peter