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

[Jonathan Marsden]

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? :)

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

(2) It might be good to capitalize CrossWire, and even make it a link to
http://www.crosswire.org perhaps?

(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!).

(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.

> 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?

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.

(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?

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?

(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?

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.

(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?

Thanks,

Jonathan