Notes on packaging GNOME Crosswords

This doc aims to provide hints to those packaging Crosswords for other platforms.

Version 0.3.14

• The editor has an optional dependency on libadwaita-1.7beta. It will compile with and without that version. If the newer library is present, a substantially fuller clue details section will appear. Future versions will just require 1.7 once it’s shipped in GNOME.

• We now install three word list resources:

  • player.gresource — 20M

  • broda.gresource — 66M

  • wordnik.gresource — 42M

  The player dict should be included with the player, while broda and wordnik should be shipped with the editor. The difference in size is because the editors have definitions included now which expands them considerably. It’s possible to shrink the player substantially down the line if the size is a problem.

• It is no longer practical for packagers to generate the word list resources from scratch. The definition files take a couple hours to build, and require downloading a 20Gb intermediate dump of wiktionary’s database. That intermediate dump takes over a day to generate from scratch, so we use a pre-generated version. I build the word lists on my computer and check them in to git.

  • The scripts to reproduce the word lists are in scripts/build-wordlist-defs.sh and scripts/build-wordlist-index.sh. Instructions on how to use the scripts are in docs/word-entry.md. In practice, if someone wants to double check them with the pregenerated definitions, running those scripts on another computer (of the same endianness) will produce byte-for-byte identical word lists.

• A consequence of the intermediate files being generated and shipped in advance is that we no longer run on big endian machines. There’s open work needed to do to byteswap when parsing the word list. I don’t know of any practical shippments on those machines, so haven’t prioritized it.