If I can’t get Bible search software for my computer, it’s not a good computer. Neither CentOS, nor any of the other compatible RedHat clones, offer a Gnomesword package for 64-bit. There is one source RPM set, but they were a bit older, and I felt I should be able to produce the latest version of both Sword (1.5.11) and Gnomesword (2.4.1). It was an adventure.
First, we build the Sword library. To have that search capability, we have to build Clucene. Again, not offered in the RedHat clones, so it’s easy enough to build from source. For this whole project, I allowed everything to install to /usr/local because that’s why that directory structure exists — stuff you want to use locally which isn’t part of the core system. It’s pretty much the same routine building packages from source. You unzip and untar in /usr/local/src and build according to instructions in the INSTALL file at the top of the package directories: configure, make, make install. Sword is pretty much the same. I already had Curl so I could build in the feature allowing downloading of modules directly from Gnomesword. Again, it was pretty much the same routine build process.
However, anything related to GNOME these days requires the pkgconfig stuff, and building Sword from source does not create the proper marker for pkgconfig. I had been through this once before long ago, but didn’t save the details in my personal help files. However, I knew I had posted it somewhere, and found it in the Usenet archives. I tweaked it to match current reality, but here’s the sword.pc file necessary for building Gnomesword:
prefix=/usr/local
exec_prefix=/usr/local
libdir=/usr/local/lib
includedir=/usr/local/include
Name: Sword
Description: Biblical Text Engine
Version: 1.5.11
Libs: -L${libdir} -lsword
Cflags: -I${includedir}/sword
With that in the proper place, I managed to build things just fine. Except: Sword does produce it’s own sword.pc, but I never knew it. I found it in the /usr/local files. It contained all the proper lib links, flags and everything. I went back and rebuilt with the one I found produced in the build process, quite by accident.
sigh
We live and learn. By the way, quite by accident I enabled the Mozilla-based rendering instead of GtkHTML, and find the Mozilla version vastly superior for my use. Having the Strong’s numbers under the line of text is more like the way the printed version appears. Fonts are more nicely done, too.
