[sword-devel] expanding the Sword canon

[Chris Little]

> I am very fond of the idea of having different versification schemes
in
> sword. This is not a matter of personal preference or religious
> propagation
> but merely scientific correctness. It is very good to display the
> documents
> (historic sources) as they are.

It's precisely for reasons of textual integrity & correctness that I
want to include some of the books, since they are no longer considered
canonical or inspired by anyone that I know of.  We also need to handle
all these texts if we want to have a product that can be used for real
scholarly study.

> I don't know how this can be done technically. But it would be nice to
> support a mechansim which is flexible enough for any kind of
versification
> scheme rather than introducing a set of new static schemes. Modules
could
> then define their own exact versification with adding, removing,
splitting,
> merging and reordering of books, chapters and verses. And to have some
> mechanism in place to sync different modules, allowing a truly
parallel
> display.

I agree, but I see versification as another problem that builds upon a
static canon.  We could debate that, but I think a static canon
including the 88 books I proposed will handle all cases and is much
simpler to implement than a dynamic canon.

I see general book support as an entirely different problem, though it
could benefit from what we can learn by implementing multiple
versifications.  I think we should support pseudepigrapha, Josephus, and
every other book that anyone might want to use in Sword using a
tree-based key system that Troy has described.  Bibles have special
needs that we can serve best if we're using a Bible-specific driver like
we have now.

And just to clarify, for everyone who isn't in #sword right now, I don't
think we should implement any of these things immediately.  Certainly
not before 1.5.3 is released.  Possibly not even for the release of
1.5.4.  But I wanted to broach the subject partly to have objections
raised so that they can be relayed to OSIS as they set their biblical
canon.

--Chris