Re: [be] Re: bibledit-3.3 released

[Teus Benschop]

Neil Mayhew wrote:
> 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.
Without the git program bibledit is rather crippled. For that reason the 
./configure script checks that git is there. The configure script also 
check that zip is there, and tee, and unzip and gzip, and so on, a whole 
lot of dependencies that are not needed to build, but are required for 
proper operation of Bibledit. Without git bibledit can't collaborate, 
can't look back in history, can merge, and so on, a whole list of 
"can't"'s. Git is required at ./configure stage, because I am afraid 
that if this would not be done there would be people who just install it 
without git, and forget about the rest being lazy, and then make support 
calls saying this or that functionality does not work, and what to do.
> 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.
As long as the configure script finds "git", it won't complain even if 
the full suite isn't there.
> > 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.
Point taken, thanks. There have been tags at the beginning when the 
switch to git was made, but for some reason they didn't propagate from 
the local repository to the online one, so I decided to drop them...

Teus.