[bt-devel] BibleTime future

[Martin Gruner]

Hi all,

I'm excited about the vivid interest in a port of BibleTime!

A word of caution: Don't underestimate the size of the current codebase. A 
rewrite from scratch that achieves the current functionality in an (almost) 
bug-free way could take years, given that we only have spare time to do it. 
The documentation would have to be rewritten, and the translations would have 
to be redone.

Therefore I want to suggest a more moderate approach (personally, I would like 
the rewrite better, but I think it is beyond our scope atm): Port the 
existing codebase to QT4. In that process, remove functionality that is not 
really neccesary (like the xml-based toolbar configuration system: a static 
qaction based would do as well). Keep the basic UI. Change the make system to 
qmake, if neccessary.

This would be achievable more quickly, imo. And after this is out, and we 
received feedback, esp. from the Windows side, we can attack the UI 
refactoring.

It would be helpful if somebody could come up with a list of KDE classes that 
we use atm, and for each document if it can a) be replaced by a qt4 
equivalent, b) dropped / recoded or c) has to be ported from KDE4. And please 
don't forget to document every research that you do at 
http://crosswire.org/ucgi-bin/twiki/view/Bibletime/WindowsPortDiscussion. 
This is a major decision, so we have to be careful and gather the neccessary 
data first, before we might (possibly) get ourselves into huge trouble.

Just my thoughts.

mg