[sword-devel] publishing user-authored modules

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Thanx to Troy yesterday for a private suggestion that worked around my
problem with search framework.

I have a longer-term question to raise, something to give thought, as to
what Sword might/should offer in the way of future infrastructure.

Probably the most common request we get for new GnomeSword features is
authoring support.  Generally this revolves around the desire of some to
be able to write up sermons and other personal commentary, or to develop
prayer lists and customized devotionals.  So I'm developing a thought
for how to go about an import operation.  But the Really Big Deal beyond
merely creating such modules is sharing them.

By comparison, Libronix has what they call the "sermon add-in".  This is
a means by which pastors and other authors can prepare their own texts
so they can then be automatically shared with others.

It's this latter capability that intrigues me.  As I work up the
importer concept for GS, the basics of getting the user to identify the
text features, collect all the needed *.conf info, pass the text through
one of the available tools, these are operations that are
straightforward.  We even have an Archive button in our module manager,
which drops a *.zip of the named modules.

What would be really cool is if we could also offer a Publish button,
whereby users could develop some community in the form of being able to
share modules they've created.

I perceive that this is a bigger issue than GnomeSword, that it ought to
have some serious infrastructural support, specifically that the Sword
install manager class could provide for the definition of upload
repositories to which modules could be sent on demand.  In the same way
that download repositories can be specified by host+directory, I'd like
to be able to offer to users, "Publish: send your module out into the
world so others benefit from what you've learned/produced/written,"
where the resulting uploaded module is then made available in a
downloadable state for others to retrieve.  The upload repository should
have some brief automated analysis of uploaded content to ensure that a
legitimately-formatted module is in place (e.g. mods.d/foo.conf, and
that DataPath matches what's found in modules/what/ever/foo), and having
thus confirmed general module sanity, move it into place for download.

Anyone else have related thoughts?