Re: [be] Installing/Updating Bibledit from http://ppa.launchpad.net/pkgcrosswire/ppa/ubuntu?

[Teus Benschop]

On Mon, 2009-05-25 at 00:23 -0700, Jonathan Marsden wrote:
> Teus Benschop wrote:
> 
> > The updated help is now online at:
> > 
> > http://www.nongnu.org/bibledit/ubuntu.html
> 
> (1) This apparently refers to bibledit 3.8 -- which does not exist yet,
> as far as I know?  A typo, or a prophecy? :)

It's just for convenience, so people know how to install the version in
git, that, hopefully, eventually will be version 3.8. The thing is that
libwebkit came in, a dependency not yet required by version 3.7. A place
was needed to put that information down somewhere.

> 
> The info on packaged versions at
> http://www.nongnu.org/bibledit/bibledit_ubuntu.html looks basically fine.

Thanks for checking the information on correctness.
> 
> (2) It might be good to capitalize CrossWire, and even make it a link to
> http://www.crosswire.org perhaps?

Sounds a good idea. The changes were made and will be visible on the
site by tomorrow.

> 
> (3) There is no need to use edge. in the URL of the Ubuntu PPAs, edge is
> the beta test version of LaunchPad, so the PPA URL should probably be
> https://launchpad.net/~pkgcrosswire/+archive/ppa -- although it will
> work OK as is, unless edge is misbehaving (which it does, sometimes,
> when they run a new test version of the LaunchPad code on it!).

Ok, didn't know this. The link has now been updated so as to remove the
"edge" bit.

> (4) I could add instructions for adding packages (and repositories, if
> desired!) using the command line, as an alternative to Synaptic, if that
> would be useful.  I'm not sure of the overall commandline vs GUI
> intent/desire for these instructions, see below.

Will comment on that below.

> 
> > And any info on pointing at the testing repositories for Debian would be
> > welcomed too.
> 
> (5) Would you prefer GUI-based, or commandline-based, or both?

For the site, thinking of the users we have, the GUI based instructions
are preferred. Those who prefer the command line may extract the command
line version out of that.

> 
> Right now there does not seem to be any info on installing bibledit
> packages in Debian at all (never mind which repositories you use to find
> the packages).  Is that correct, or did I just not find it?  Also, the
> Debian info for source tarball and manual build installs stops at
> version 3.6... 3.7 works fine on Debian too.

This is correct, because when the documentation was updated, at that
time there were still no packages in Debian that were recent enough to
care about. But since you have provided the packages also into the
Debian system, the situation has changed.


> 
> (6) Would you like a bibletime_debian.html file that is similar to the
> bibletime_ubuntu one?  If so, is HTML the preferred editable form for
> this kind of help information, or should I be working in DocBook XML or
> something like that to create this?

Yes, I prefer a one similar to the ubuntu one for debian. Html right now
is preferred, because we don't use DocBook XML yet for creating the
documentation. Thanks for your offer to create that information.

> 
> Overall the level of user these instructions are suited for seems to
> vary; some (like http://www.nongnu.org/bibledit/install_bibledit.html )
> assume a degree of command line fluency.  Some, such as
> http://www.nongnu.org/bibledit/36_debian50.html seem to start out being
> very novice friendly (guiding people step by step through using the
> Synaptic GUI), and then you just tell them to open a terminal window
> (without saying specifically how to do so) and then drop them into
> http://www.nongnu.org/bibledit/install_bibledit.html once they have
> installed the build prerequisites using the GUI.  To me, this seems odd;
> if a user is going to have to open a terminal window and work at the
> command line anyway, then cutting and pasting something like:
> 
>   su -c "apt-get install g++ libgtk2.0-dev libsqlite3-dev libxml2-dev \
>     git-core libenchant-dev libgtkhtml3.14-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
>     rcs libgtksourceview2.0-dev"
> 
> is faster and easier than following all the GUI instructions, I would think?

Yes, it would be faster, but some users are new to Linux, or even those
not very new to it, and they prefer the information to be given to them
step by step and use the GUI. It is only that compiling from source must
have the command line, so the new users cannot escape from that. It
would be a great help if packages were described for them how to use
that. This would keep them all in the GUI, so they would never have the
command line in front of them.


> 
> (7) In general, what level of user expertise are the install
> instructions on the bibledit site (and so in the bibledit help) intended
> for?  What level of comfort in a terminal window (shell prompt) is expected?

I would say for a novice. I always strive to make any configuration
files editable from within Bibledit, so that nobody ever needs to open a
shell to do something "under the hood", as they call it.

> 
> Incidentally, I didn't check all of the instructions for all Linux
> distributions (!), but I did notice that the ones for Knoppix seem very
> old indeed - Knoppix 4.0 is no longer on the Knoppix download mirrors at
> all.

Agreed, some are very old, and could be removed. But updated ones would
need to replace those, and that needs a bit of time. If you like pls.
submit a task for updating all help for all distros.

> 
> (8) One more (minor?) thing I noticed: bibledit is GPLed, but under the
> (fairly strict) Debian interpretation of the GPL, this means you should
> not link bibledit to openssl.  Yet your instructions suggest using
> libcurl4-openssl-dev -- why was that chosen?  Wouldn't it be more in
> keeping with the "Debian way" to use libcurl4-gnutls-dev instead?

I wasn't aware of these strict rules that the Debian folks put out for
us to swallow (and even if I was aware of that, I wouldn't care...). For
some reason however, the GNU version came in, see Bibledit 3.8 on Ubuntu
9.04. But events have overtaken all of this, as the new version now in
git no longer requires libcurl but uses libwebkit instead, and this
library does all the data transport internally, and there's no need for
an external url fetcher like libcurl. However, if libcurl would be
needed later on, and if Debian people are happy with that, it would be
fine with me to use the GNU version of it.

Thanks for your support,

Teus.