[bt-devel] Judges: Judg or Jud? and the handling of invalid references

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 21:34 -0700, Jonathan Marsden wrote:
> I think I've found an interesting bug... or maybe more than one?
> 
> In ISBE, references to verses in Judges use the abbreviation "Jud" for
> the book name.  See the first reference in the output of
> 
>   diatheke -b ISBE -k abuse
> 
> for an example, or open the ISBE in BT and look up the entry for abuse.
> 
> BibleTime apparently treats this abbreviation as being an abbreviation
> for Jude, and so clicking on these links (or hovering over them and
> looking at the mag window) is... an unexpected adventure :)
> 
> Often references are to a chapter and verse of Judges that have no
> corresponding chapter and verse in Jude (Jude being so short)... so you
> (somehow!) get linked to Revelation instead.
> 
> Bugs:
> 
> (a) References to books of the Bible should use some standard form for
> the names of books.  MHC uses Judg for Judges, which works fine in BT.
> ISBE uses Jud for Judges, which does not work correctly in BT.  Where is
> the standard defined, and which one is correct (I'd guess ISBE is
> correct) according to that standard?
> 
> (b) References to "Jud X:Y" should *never* link into Revelation.  Either
> Jud is an invalid book abbrevation, in which case BT should probably say
> that in the mag window, or else it is a valid book abbreviation for
> either Judges (so link there) or Jude (so link there, if the chapter and
> verse exist, and display a warning if they don't).  But linking into
> Revelation in these circumstances is just plain wrong... surely?
> 
> (c) I'd expect that a quick fix would be to change all the references
> that start with "Jud " in the ISBE into "Judg " and then compile the
> resulting text back into a module again.  That's theoretically a simple
> one liner:
> 
>   mod2imp ISBE |sed -e 's/>Jud />Judg /g' |imp2ld ISBE ISBE
> 
> On my system that takes up 100% of one CPU core... for a long time...!
> I'm not sure if I did something wrong in the command above, am just too
> impatient to wait for it to run, or if imp2ld is buggy on my system in
> some way?
> 
> 
> Overall, this whole thing feels so odd that I'm not opening a bug yet.
> Can someone confirm that my reasoning above is basically correct, and
> offer an opinion on whether this is just a buggy module (ISBE) or a BT
> bug or even a SWORD library bug, or some combination thereof?
> 
<snip>
Hello, all. It's a pleasure to see the recent flurry of activity on
BibleTime.

Might I mention a related problem which results from not validating
references against the translation being used? Translations based upon
the Vulgate and hence indirectly upon the LXX have major problems
because of the deutero-canonical books, the different verse ordering
(I've not checked about some of the varying names such as Fourth Kings).
I don't know if this can be addressed as part of this issue.  Peace and
Joy - John
-- 
John A. Sullivan III
Open Source Development Corporation
+1 207-985-7880
jsullivan at opensourcedevel.com

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