[bt-devel] Integration into KDE (e.g. KDEEDU)

[Heiko Evermann]

Hi Cristian

> My name is Cristian Balean and I am helping with the translation of
> BibleTime to Romanian. I thank you for your offer and I would personally
> love to see BibleTime integrated into KDE. But do you think this if
> feasible, having a Christian program integrated right into KDE? Do you
> think the KDE folks would accept this?
I think one should stress the educational aspect: 
* the ease of comparison of bible translations
* the demonstration of language capabilities of KDE (foreign fonts, foreign
languages)
* the help in learning a foreign language by comparison of the different
versions in different languages.

I think the Christian aspect should not matter. KDE is international, but
that should not mean that it is anti-religious. My main point here is: I
would really like to see something for the Quran available for KDE. The
comparison between Arabic and English/German translation would help me a lot
to learn Arabic. As a Bible believing Christian I would like to have a tool
like that to better be able to point out where Islam differs from
Christianity. So (the other way round) a muslim should not complain about a
Bible study help in KDE.

Besides: a KDE distribution would first of all be a source distribution. The
source of kdeedu/bibletime would ship without preinstalled Bible modules,
even without the sword library. A binary release (e.g. from SUSE) would ship
with a precompiled sword library, but possibly still without the Bible. The
program would then allow the user to download a Bible in a language of his
choice.

Maybe the suse distribution would even preinstall a bible module, but they
could also do so also for a similar muslim program. 

And an Arabic Linux distro can still leave that program out. No distro is
forced to provide binary version of all programs.

So I would really like to see a consensus here in this list to go to KDE and
ask for inclusion.

> As for how much work it would be to keep BibleTime up to date with KDE, I
> am not sure. That is a question for the real developers like Joachim,
> Martin and others. Also the question is would they be willing and would
> they have time to do this? As for me I would love to help with anything I
> can. I think this would be really big and awesome for BibleTime and not
> only!
I think this is not a real problem. The only real limit is that bugfix
distributions (like 3.4.1/3.4.2 etc.) cannot have new features, but only
bugfixes. Development happens in the HEAD branches and HEAD will be shipped
at the main releases (KDE 3.3, 3.4 etc.). One could still publish more
intermediate releases on bibletime.info, but not within the maintenance
releases of KDE.

Concerning being up to date with KDE development: this is something
bibletime has to strive for anyway. And having it included into KDE
development would also mean more eyes to spot the errors. So this is a net
gain for bibletime.

Kind regards,

Heiko Evermann

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