[sword-devel] Important things!

[Joachim Ansorg]

Hi all!

I'm at home again after discussing with Martin about BibleTime.

We looked at programs like Bible Works 4.0 and Bible Workshop.
They are really great programs (especially Bible Works) and they have 
features which are required for Sword and frontends (e.g. BibleTime).

I'll list now the major problems of Sword we found:

	-Sword offers many modules, but many of them are locked! Bible Works does 
include them unlocked. Troy is doing a great job here but it's not possible 
that everybody is waiting for Troy's help.
PLEASE WRITE TO THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS - YOU!
I already contacted the German Bible Society and I discuss with them-
There are so many users of Sword, everybody is complaining about locked 
modules (NIV,...), and only few people are contacting the Bible Societies.

	-Chris and MPJ are doing a great job with modules! There are lots of free
non-english texts out there which can be included in Sword. On this list are 
so many people which can't program, so I wonder if they subscibed to discuss 
religious topics. But this list is called "sword-devel", it's the DEVELOPMENT 
list of Sword! Please don't be so lazy, do something for Sword! We do have 
now the new mod2vpl and vpl2mod utilities and I'm sure Chris has some cool 
perl scripts to create modules. My brother does also have some (he did the 
GerLut1545, Rieger and MAK modules with his scripts).

	-Sword's webpage is bad. Sorry Troy, but this is true. It's not my aim to 
start a flame war. Troy, some time ago people said on sword-support that they 
volunteer to design a new webpage. I think these people are right, you do 
already 99.9% of the coding, let other people design the pages! We are open 
source.
The current design is confusing people, the page is too dark for a christian 
project. Almost everything on the screen is black, some users may think it's 
related to evil things ;)
Troy, the download script is very good! I like it.

	-Sword is a growing project and sometimes things changed from good to bad 
over the years. I think we should discuss about the things which should be 
changed or removed. For example the whole search system is mixed up. We do 
have now different search types (regExp, excat, multiple words), different 
search speeds (with and without framework, bibles my have one, commentaries 
and lexica can't have one). After we introduced the new search things we 
discussed recently (Index...) everything will be mixed up more. In this case 
I'd suggest to implement a search system, which has the common things like 
"AND, OR, NOT" and which provides the same speed for all types of modules. 
Another question is how we search in new modules which may appear in the 
future (maps, sound (e.g. AudioBible), ...), not all modules are key based.
Another thing which should be discussed are modules, we have two config 
formats (mods.d and mods.conf), we have lots of different module types and 
formats (GBF, ThML, RawText, RawFiles, RawCom, RawLD), this is confusing 
users and developers!
Maybe we should compress the modules and put them all into one directory, but 
this is just a quick thought.

	-The windows frontend has too few features and is not useable with lots of 
modules (For example if you use the Sword CD). 
I have a Linux only box, I saw the program the first time while I met Martin. 
It has some nice features I like but in comparision with other programs it's  
not very good.
We (the team of BibleTime) want port BibleTime after we released version 1.0. 
Is it possible that we are the standard Sword frontend on Windows? I don't 
want to be arrogant, but we have more features (e.g. printing, bookmarks, 
better search dialog) and I think it's more useable.
Troy, this was only a question. I know you do the coding of Sword and of the 
Windows Frontend and you work to earn the money you need for living and 
nobody else is coding for Sword. Why not concentrate on the Sword library?
But we can't port BibleTime if we can't get a Qt professional license
($1500 / year). Is somebody owner of such a license wo want to compile 
BibleTime for Windows? Or is here  a billionaire who can pay the license?

	-We are missing things like Unicode support or language parsing features 
(e.g. morphologic analysis), but the implementation of them is really hard, 
so this is no current topic. Is here some export of the Hebrew or Greek 
language who's able to do the morphologic analysis?
Is here some Unicode expert?

Tro, Chris, MPJ, Trevor I really don't want to flame. I like Sword. Without 
Sword BibleTime and the other frontend would be impossible!
Troy, I don't want to nerve you to implement the features, I know you are 
busy. But why can't the other users do something?

--Joachim