Comment # 3 on bug 1095172 from Greg Hellings

At some point I got added as a maintainer of Sword in SuSE. This is interesting
to me because I haven't used it in a decade. But I am the release manager for
Sword and the package maintainer in Fedora for Sword, BibleTime, and Xiphos. I
say that in order to tell you I'm not comfortable giving you a PR or doing the
fixes myself in your repos but I can give you some information on what's going
on.

Sword is probably failing to build because of changes in ICU 61. This is a
known issue that has been discussed on the Sword development list. I plan to
cook up a fix for the CMake build system soon to handle it natively. Until that
time, the build can be fixed by adding -DU_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE=1 to the
CXXFLAGS when Sword is being compiled.

Anyone doing that work should also update Sword. Currently your repositories
claim Sword 1.7.5. This is a patently bad idea. Sword 1.7.5 was never released
because there were enough problems with 1.7.5 alpha 1 that the 1.7 series was
abandoned and the 1.8 series was pushed out to address the problems. 1.7.5
should not be packaged, but should instead be replaced with 1.8.1 at the same
time the ICU fix is included.

HTH