[sword-devel] EarlyFathers Genbook and the ability to search genbooks

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Daniel Owens <dhowens at pmbx.net> writes:
> the wrong notice would only look ridiculous to the
> kind of people who would make use of this.

The one-sentence addition to About is a minor yet accurate summary.

> Regarding the question of breaking up the module, if there aren't
> major performance problems with keeping it together, there is good
> reason to keep it as one module. 

As far as I'm concerned, it's one module.  Anyone wanting to strip out
specific subsections as independent modules is free to do so.  (It would
be easy: mod2imp; edit to exclude everything but what's wanted; strip
common prefixes in keys of the retained section; imp2gbs.)

> That brings me to another issue: the ability to search genbooks and
> commentaries. I have a vague memory of comments on this forum to the
> effect that such a feature isn't necessary or desireable, but the
> Father's module is a prime example of the kind of genbook that one
> would want to be able to search.

GS is happy to search genbooks; I would think any of the UIs would be.

However, I did find 2 problems in doing so in GS:

- A lucene search for "usury" coughs up just 2 hits, whereas a plain,
  blunt, "multi-word" (slow) search coughs up 82.  Probable Sword bug?

- I tripped over a bug in which GS hangs when trying to select a
  result for viewing in the Adv.Search window, which I'll fix tomorrow.

> I don't know what kind of load that puts on the engine
> (creating indexes and such), but it seems to me it ought to be a basic
> part of the functionality of the Sword front-ends.

mkfastmod (or integrated equivalent in the UIs) takes about 30sec on my
1.8GHz laptop.  Lucene search takes less than a second; multi-word
search takes about 25sec.

> It would just be nice to have a general
> search dialog that gave the option to search in all genbooks and
> commentaries and maybe even dictionaries.

GS provides for custom module lists to be searched.  Define a list and
include EarlyFathers in it.  Or define a list and include every genbook
in it.