[bt-devel] BibleTime's Goals (was Re: New passage selector proposal)

Sat Apr 21 13:15:25 MST 2012

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Hi!

On 20.04.2012 19:07, Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> I hear what you're saying Greg, though I find your detailed issues
> not insurmountable.
> 
> My comments in this thread are mostly rhetorical; I wasn't looking
> for technical responses.
> 
> We need to decide:
> 
> Are we a community?  Why are we a community?  What EXACTLY do we
> have in common?  How can we work together on that commonality?  I
> see that as SWORD.
> 
> I don't plan on living forever and I would love for the many
> projects that use the SWORD engine to start owning it more than
> they do.
> 
> 
> 
> The vision for SWORD has always been to produce a lean and
> powerful, cross-platform Bible research framework which many
> projects can share in using and developing.  I believe we've
> attained that over its 20 year life-cycle, but I don't believe
> we've seen the contributions to the core engine that we could see
> if people would buy in and own it as their backend.  I've
> personally written at least 5 frontends with the engine and all my
> frontend work has driven improvements to the engine.  I haven't
> worked on a frontend in a long time and am no longer on the front
> lines-- situated to know what improvements now need to be made.  I 
> would love it if each frontend project had one developer who was 
> intimately familiar with SWORD and could liaise between the backend
> and frontend teams and contribute to both.
> 
> Greg, I appreciate your contributions to the engine.  Please don't
> think my goal is to accuse and blame anyone for never contributing
> to the engine.  I'm just attempting to make our projects think
> about our involvement with each other and how we can work more
> closely together.

Ok. Before I start I want to say that I'm largely going to ignore
everything said on this thread and will try to keep matters simple by
replying only as a developer, and write about how I think and feel
about this situation. I will try to be concise.

When I got involved, I got involved with BibleTime. It is a piece of
software being developed by a small team of volunteering individuals
in its own repository. BibleTime largely utilizes the Sword library
for displaying and managing the installed works. I was not present at
the birth of BibleTime or Sword, but when I joined the cause, I didn't
see BibleTime and Sword as one project, but two. Regarding the
development process I have never before considered BibleTime and Sword
to be one community, although they have appeared somewhat close to one
another. Whether they were one development community in the past I do
not know.

My focus has always been on BibleTime and I've tried to improve it as
best as I've been able to. In this matter my focus has always been on
BibleTime and I haven't much considered hacking on Sword. The most
important reasons for this have been that
1) I've never actully understood Sword very well
2) I haven't much considered that I could change Sword

The first reason might be because the API has always appeared to me to
be a bit weird (their own string classes, strings as key indexes,
#includes without a "sword" prefix etc) and I haven't seen much good
documentation on it. In addition we've had some trouble with Sword in
BibleTime because the text we get from Sword has sometimes contained
tags from the underlying markup, or some other weird syntax. In my
opinion, the worst problem with this is that there is no formal
specification (formal grammar) for this kind of Sword output and
parsing/translating it is still a very esoteric matter for me. Maybe
you do have the knowledge and insight needed for this because you've
been with the project for long. I don't and I haven't found a simple
way to get it.

The second reason might be because it has almost never entered my mind
that I actually could participate in the development of Sword. I think
Sword has always appeared to me to be rather closed both regarding the
development process and documentation (e.g. file format specs). I've
never actually seen or understood what goes on behind the scenes, I
have no idea how to join or where are documented the procedures about
how to contribute / submit patches.

Several times I've thought about changing the Sword API. Since
contributing to Sword has always seemed to me as an obstacle, I have
rather thought about writing an alternative backend for reading Sword
modules or forking Sword for BibleTime's purposes and using it as a
git submodule etc etc. Occasionally I have also arrived to the
question about fixing some Sword bugs or deficiencies, but I've ended
up abandoning or working around these as it has seemed to be much easier.

This is how I have thought and felt about this. My intentions have
been to advance BibleTime, an end-user application depending Qt and Sword.

Maybe there once was a common development community. Either way it
seems to me there's not much left of it now. I might be mistaken thou,
because I don't know exactly what the relation BibleTime's older
developers have had with Sword/Crosswire. However, previous devs leave
or become inactive and new ones join.

I think the questions to ask should not be about what we are, but
rather about how do we fix this? How do we build renew our relations
and (re)build this community? How can we better communicate and help
each other?

I think the Sword project seriosly needs to think about some changes
to make it easier for people (me) to contribute. I'm going to be very
very bold now. Please try to bear in mind I only mean well. I'm going
to be very bold and suggest the following:
  1) Migrate to git(orious) (Yeah, I'm being bold and suggest
gitorious just because that's what BibleTime uses and because I
personally object the github EULA). Move to a DVCS to provide other
developers a better way to contribute. Allow them to request their
changes to be merged to your main repository, talk and work together
with them when reviewing their changes. Open up the development process.
  2) Write more documentation. Write better documentation. It must be
something which actually helps developers understand Sword (ideally
all of Sword they will ever use). It must help them understand Sword,
not just use Sword. Architectural (UML) diagrams might help. Document
the file formats, specify a formal grammar for the texts Sword outputs.
  3) Be prepared for hardship and change. :)

I believe we would benefit from (re)building this community. But we
really need to think what we need to do to make this relationship
work. I'm not sure whether any of us are ready now, but I suggest we
get ready and try anyway. My suggestions might not be the best ones,
but these reflect the issues I've been struggling with and which have
prevented me from becoming "intimate" with Sword.

I hope this helps and that I haven't spent the last (four?) hours on
this letter for nothing. Let's please try to continue these
discussions in a manner pleasing to God!

God bless!
Jaak
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