[sword-devel] Re: [sword-devel]Squeak Sword UI

[Chris Little]

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003 porton@narod.ru wrote:

> > It will be interesting to see if the Sword Module system stabilizes in 
> > light of OSIS.

Sword will not be dropping any module formats as a result of OSIS.  OSIS
is being used as an import format at the moment.  In the future, we might
base additional formats on OSIS, but they will still be proprietary
additions to the OSIS format (like indexes into the files).  We don't
intend to build a DOM parser into Sword.

Similar to what others have suggested, you might think of just doing an
OSIS reader and not try to read Sword modules.  There are quite a few of
them and you'll need to be quite familiar with C++ in order to understand
the code that reads/writes them.
 
> The problem is not what is format of entries (e.g. OSIS), but the format
> but a module (as a whole, the structure how it is split to entries).
> 
> Why we don't use a database library (db1/db2/db3, are to bloated and so
> I think not acceptable), but there are also several other similar
> formats? I recommend to switch to such a database in a future version of
> Sword instead of our own messed code, which is now.

I don't think any of the maintainers consider there to be any problem with
the current module formats, so there's really no chance of us abandoning
them.  There's no felt need.  We also don't want the added bloat of adding
a database engine to Sword or the overhead of running one or the
difficulty it would add to porting.  The current formats are specialized
and tuned to their task.

--Chris