[sword-devel] Why I think there should be a Sword 1.5.4

[Martin Gruner]

> I get the impression that our users and front end authors would
> appreciate a 1.5.3 release to be sooner rather than later, in which case
> I think we ought to plan on a 1.5.4 release.  

This is correct. We'd appreciate smaller and more frequent releases, which 
could be done by implementing some of the features below and making a smaller 
release (.4, .5 etc.). 1.5.3 could be released right now (from a 
feature-point of view).
Things I leave uncommented should imho go into 1.5.4:

> 1) i18n
> 2) general book support

Should probably wait to 1.5.5 or later, too big a change. Requires a lot of 
work in the frontends.

> 3) expanded ciphering support
> 4) apocrypha support

Probably it would be better not to go 2 steps, but handle this with the new 
versification scheme handling, which would be much more flexible? It will 
require changes in the frontends anyway...
So probably wait until 1.5.6 and be combined with versification.

> 5) UTF-8 regex support
> 6) bookmark interface

This is not as simple as you might think. To make them shareable you must 
think about i18n() here too. You need to think about the versification stuff. 
And finally it might be good to have the data in XML to make it useful for 
other ppl too.
So imo this could wait a bit. Probably until 1.7.x

> 7) swtext++
> 8) search on (currently) stripped items
>
> Currently, Strong's numbers, morph tags, etc. are stripped out for
> searches.  There are of course circumstances where a person would
> explicitly want to search for a given morph tag or Strong's number, so
> we should make sure a facility for this exists.

YES! It should be possible to search in each layer of text (base, stongs, 
morph, etc.) independently. This is not likely to be possible with the 
current approach, and might require a thorough change in the api, which would 
be good, but maybe too big a task for now. And while doing this, things like 
making the searches faster (realtime?, indexing) should be considered too. So 
this probably should wait too. Maybe 1.7.x.

Martin