[sword-devel] Other religions?

[Mete Kural]

Hi Chris,

I am convinced by what you say that the GenBooks
drivers need to be enhanced to handle books such as
Gospel of James, Gospel of Barnabas and the Quran
which have the same chapter/verse structure of a book
of the Bible, rather than forking the code. In that
case though, I feel that a special case needs to be
made within the GenBooks drivers for books that have
chapter/verse structures just like a books of the
Bible such as the ones mentioned above since a driver
that is aware of the chapter/verse structure of a book
could become much more useful. For instance, having
chapter and verse navigation controls as in the Bible
interface would be very useful for books with
chapter/verse structure. But how can efficient
chapter/verse support be implemented within the
GenBooks drivers such that other books that have more
levels of hierarchies could still be respectfully
supported? Would it be using a lot of if then
statements such that "if(the book is a chapter/verse)
do this, else if(it is other structure) do this"?

God bless,
Mete

--- Chris Little <chrislit@crosswire.org> wrote:
> Hi Mete,
> 
> On Sat, 17 Apr 2004, Mete Kural wrote:
>  
> > I read that you are using a term "driver" such as
> Bible drivers, GenBook
> > drivers. Are drivers modular application
> components that you can plug in
> > to Sword to enable it to display books in a
> specialized manner? For
> > example Bible drivers for displaying the Bible and
> GenBook drivers to
> > display general books.
> > 
> > If that is the case is it possible to design Sword
> in such a way that
> > one can develop his/her own driver and plug it in
> to Sword. For example
> > Sword could come with Bible and GenBook drivers by
> default. And then
> > someone could develop a Quran driver if they
> wished to and plug it in to
> > Sword. The Quran driver could simply be a driver
> that extends the
> > GenBook. Would it be possible to write more
> specialized drivers that
> > extend the Quran driver.
> 
> Bible, GenBook, and LD drivers of various types are
> essentially modular,
> but they are could not be characterized as plug-ins.
>  If someone were to
> completely ignore my reasoning from previous
> messages and, against all
> sound engineering sense, decided that they wanted to
> derive a
> Qur'an-specific driver.  Anyone who went down that
> path would be obliged
> to fork the code.  There's no chance of such code
> being incorporated in
> Sword.  Completely ignoring the fact that CrossWire
> is a Christian
> organization, it would just be a very bad design &
> engineering decision.  
> A project to produce such a fork would (soon enough)
> find that it's
> difficult to maintain synchronization with current
> releases of Sword plus
> at least one highly specialized front-end.  Before
> long, the people
> working on such a project would lose interest and it
> would shrivel up and
> die.  (I'm not being overly pessimistic here.  I've
> just seen many far
> less complicated projects go through this type of
> lifecycle.) You should
> just trust me that GenBooks are the way to go for
> any hierarchical book
> that is not a Bible, but the GPL, of course, permits
> you do try this if 
> you really want to.
>   
> > Yes there are also other books such as the Book of
> Sirach that is
> > generally not accepted by Protestant denominations
> but has always been
> > accepted by the Catholic Church. There is also two
> other Gospels
> > recently discovered through archialogical efforts:
> Gospel of James and
> > Gospel of Barnabas. These books are not part of
> the mainstream canonized
> > Bible but they are accepted by certain
> denominations. Such
> > extra-biblical books such as the Book of Sirach,
> Gospel of James, Gospel
> > of Barnabas, and the Quran, nonetheless, have
> structure exactly the same
> > as any book of the Bible. Therefore it makes a lot
> of sense to be able
> > to view such books using an interface similar to
> the Bible interface.
> > How can this be accomplished?
> 
> Sirach/Ecclesiasticus is a book of the Bible.  We'll
> have that included in 
> Sword's Bibles where appropriate as soon as
> possible.  (Again, this is the 
> sort of shortcoming that Daniel's work should
> address.)
> 
> The Infancy Gospel of James and the Gospel of
> Barnabas fall into a group 
> of books generally termed the New Testament
> Apocrypha.  There are a number 
> of good "canons" under which this sort of literature
> is collected.  The 
> Apostolic Fathers, for example, are generally
> regarded as "true" writings, 
> more or less by the authors to whom they are
> attributed.  Then there are 
> works such as the Infancy Gospel of James and the
> Gospel of Barnabas, 
> which fall into the category of poorly executed
> medieval forgeries.  
> There's no real reason not to make such material
> available (provided it 
> carries appropriate disclaimers, where applicable),
> but again these would 
> be GenBooks.  The two versions of Ethiopic Enoch
> (i.e. 1 Enoch) that we 
> currently provided are a perfect example of how we
> might handle such 
> material.
> 
> --Chris
> 
> 
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