[jsword-devel] Update

[DM Smith]

Glad you had a good holiday.

I like your Dad's idea.

I went on one this weekend and showed BibleDesktop to everyone I could. 
For the most part the response was polite (they don't do personal Bible 
Study).

I did get some good feedback. Most of the machines were 128M ram on 
dialup. This produced two distinctly different problems.
First the size: Our program is run with -mx512M. This seemed to cause a 
lot of disk thrashing. I had upped it to 512M because indexing caused 
out of memory problems. It may be worthwhile to revisit this once Lucene 
replaces ser.

WRT dialup, I had forgotten how painful it is. When running a fresh 
installation of BD over dialup some "issues" came up:
The initial screen asks whether bibles should be installed. (This is 
fine.) When the user selects one and clicks on install (once they figure 
out to load the index [which is already in our list of things to do]) 
the program seems to hang. There is no progress meter. (It is on the 
main window which is not shown yet). And it takes a long long time, 
without warning.

So, here are some possible solutions (some are requests that other's made):
Show a progress meter.
Show the sizes of each of the modules (I don't think that this is that 
easy.) Right now the only way I see is to do an http directory listing 
and parsing the page. This is really ugly and easily broken by server 
changes. I wonder if it would be possible to have it added to the confs. 
(Troy, can you answer this?)
Show an estimate of the time it will take and ask the user to confirm 
the download. (When the mods.d.tar.gz is downloaded, we can time it and 
use it for computing an estimated download rate.) This dialog could be 
conditional, either a checkbox "Don't ask me again. Just do it" or 
noticing the user has broadband and not putting up the dialog (e.g. the 
estimated download time is < 15 seconds, or something like that)
If we can monitor the download by noticing the number of bytes 
transferred and compare that against the expected total bytes, we could 
have a determinate progress meter.
Add a cancel button and do a cleanup of an incomplete download.


Joe Walker wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Back again - good holiday.
>I've had a brief conversation with Mark about Scarab and bug systems
>and we agree that Scarab is not complete enough. I've spoken to
>Atlassian about Jira and they've granted us a free license! So I'll
>install that fairly soon.
>
>My dad has been having a go with BibleDesktop and his comment was that
>we should add the ability to search for strongs numbers. He said a
>search he commonly wanted was along the lines show me where word X is
>not translated as Y, which could be as simple as "H1045 -love". I'm
>not sure how Lucene copes with multiple indexes, but it might be
>something worth bearing in mind.
>
>Joe.
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