[sword-devel] Sword ideas

Joachim Ansorg sword-devel@crosswire.org
Sun, 21 May 2000 16:22:19 +0000


Hi all!

You wrote on Sam, 20 Mai 2000:

<SNIP>

>On the topic of easing installation be making our modules consist of a
>single file, that might not be a bad idea.  We could build in tarball
>support without affecting the indexing except by constant offsets that could
>be read from the tarball.  I'm not sure if we need to worry about easing
>installation in this way, however.  It might be more effective to simply
>push people to use the installers.

Tarball installation is good. The user copies the tarball into the SWORD directory and the other things
will be done on next startup of SWORD (extracting ...).

But at the moment installation is somehow confusing for users of BibleTime. I get
often mails about problems encrypted modules, permission problems, non-working
peronal commentaries etc.

I was thinking about a small installer dialog in BibleTime 0.3. The user downloads the 
tar.gz from the web unless he has a SWORD-CD.
He opens the dialog and installs the module (permissions will be set, possibility to install into the home
directory ...).
But this dialog is only an idea. I have other things to implement before this.

>About using a uniform format, I have to disagree.  I think we should use the
>format that best suits the text.  For Bibles with markup, that is typically
>GBF.  For other texts, it's typically ThML (but someone's being lazy and
>hasn't finished the filters, sorry -- unless some other kind sould took that
>over from me :).  Often enough, though, plain text is the best choice.
>Having lots of supported formats available gives us versatility.  What
>aspects do you perceive it as over-complicating?  Does it make front-end
>authoring too complicated or is it something to do with module authoring or
>user installation?

Problems do exist with personal commentary modules.
BibleTime uses HTML, but if the format is PLAIN, the tags will be stripped out by the 
plaintohtml filter.


>--Chris
-- 
BibleTime - the bible study program for KDE
http://www.bibletime.de/
info@bibletime.de