[be] Re: bibledit-3.3 released

[Neil Mayhew]

On 18/06/08 11:32 AM Teus Benschop wrote:
> Jason Hopkins wrote:
> > I'm trying to install bibledit from source.
> >
> > sudo ./configure throws the following:
> >
> > configure:7469: error: Program "git" is needed. Install this first.
> >
> > I have git (GNU Interactive Tools) installed.  Is this the git it is 
> > looking for?
> >   
> The package it looks for is "git-core".

I'm not sure this should be a requirement of the build process. git
needs to be on the machine where bibledit will run, but as far as I can
tell it's not needed to build bibledit. So I don't think the configure
script should require it. I encountered this when trying to build
bibledit for OLPC, since that is a cross-development process.

I guess there's no great harm in having git be a build requirement,
since a user who wants to install bibledit from source onto their own
machine will need git anyway, and a developer should be using git to get
the bibledit sources. However, it doesn't seem logical to me. I think
bibledit should check at run-time, and put up an alert if git is not
available. It can always be installed after bibledit is built.

One other point about git dependency: I found in the past when trying
to work with bibledit on the OLPC that installing the full git package
was too big. Since bibledit uses only a subset of the possible git
commands, I was hopeful of being able to install just the git commands
that bibledit needs. The full thing requires perl to be installed.
However, I think the latest stable XO builds do have the equivalent of
git-core installed.

> By the way just now a new bibledit-3.3.tar.gz was uploaded that solves 
> a crash...

Since I hope to contribute patches from time to time, I checked out the
bibledit sources with git. However, I noticed that you are not using
tags at all to tie up the revisions in the git tree with specific
numbered releases of bibledit. Could I encourage you to do that, since
it will make it easier for others to work with you? I've found tags to
be an extremely useful mechanism in other projects.

--Neil