[bt-devel] What is the difference of Category and ModuleType?

[Peter von Kaehne]

On 29/07/10 19:47, Olaf Radicke wrote:
> ...then a redundant data? It's look like low consistency.
>   

Without wishing to become ratty, it would make utter sense if you first
get yourself acquainted with the library, its functions, its concepts
and its capabilities prior to making every single post appear as a
criticism. I am watching these threads with some amazement. I am no
BibleTime coder, but am impressed by their patience towards your
constant negative tone in conjunction with much ignorance. You may be a
brilliant coder (I am none, so I can not comment on that) but I would
not want to work with you at the current rate. Now, I am not a BibleTime
developer, so you can ignore this post, if you wish so.

Insofar as the modules are concerned, no, I do not think there is much
redundancy.

1) The four module types are essentially four (3 1/2) different ways of
encoding, accessing and organising a text. Incidentally these types
happen to correspond to common categories of literature.

"Bible" -  a text organised along a canon of biblical books, chapters,
verse, using a specific versification scheme and specific markup.

"Commentary", much the same, but with often bulky material not
corresponding to specific verses or even chapters.

"GenBook" - a text much like most common books organised under a single
overarching title, with an arbitrary depth hierarchy of parts, sections,
chapters etc.

"LexDic" a text of a huge number of often short components, organised
along an ordered set of keys.

This is the technical bit. There is not much in human literature which
can not be gainfully encoded with the help of one of the four types
above. A lot of stuff can gainfully be encoded in several of such ways.
We have some Bibles encoded as GenBooks. This is one of  the two ways
(currently rather dormant) in which we can deal with different
versification schemes and canons.

2) Users do not care about our technical representation. They organise
their books/modules in categories of content, irrespective of underlying
driver. While a devotional book may internally be very similar to a
lexicon, it is something entirely different in content and a frontend
which shows both as the same is missing the point. Similarly a GenBook
encoded Bible should not appear as a GenBook but as a ordinary Bible as
far as the user is concerned.

So, "Type" is about technical underpinnings, "Category" about user and
content. There is no real redundancy here.

yours

Peter