[sword-devel] Taming Wild Threads (was: Getting stuff done (Re: External links))

[Chris Little]

Manfred Bergmann wrote:
> Am 27.11.2008 um 13:57 schrieb Chris Little:
> 
>> And I think many of the complaints from the last few days come from
>> individuals who cannot or will not respect authority. Change to  
>> current
>> systems and workflows can come, but not without respect for the  
>> existing
>> policies and guiding principles.
> 
> Where can I read about those policies and guiding principles?
> And how do I subscribe to them?
> 
> Who is the authority here? Sorry, I'm on here now for almost two years  
> and only have a slight idea who is responsible for what.
> I only know that Troy, DM and you have - official tasks so to speak.
> Is this written somewhere?
> 
> In general I need to say, policies and principles are good. And they  
> are for us to guide and make things easier.
> But with gaining experience over time they need to be thought over and  
> changed if needed.

The particular policies that I'm referring to are that we are aiming at 
use of OSIS and TEI for new content, with the exception of certain 
CCEL-derived content which makes sense to maintain in ThML.

We want to encourage people to encode their content well, in a format 
that is fairly strict, standard, and relatively easy to process.

We've had the pro-OSIS policy for a very long time. The use of TEI is 
obviously recent, but derives essentially from the pro-OSIS policy, on 
the basis that TEI is what OSIS is in some respects inspired by and on 
the basis of the stated intention to use TEI within OSIS for dictionaries.

These decisions were made on and off the mailing list, in public 
discussions and the occasional decision-making chat or email between 
those people who do the majority of content, engine coding, & utility 
coding (basically those you name; sorry if I left anyone out, no offense 
intended).

The present thread was begun because Karl recommended a solution that is 
in opposition to our fundamental move towards OSIS and TEI and that had 
no guarantee of working outside of GnomeSword.

This isn't gnomesword-devel. Here, we have a responsibility of seeing 
that all of the frontends are served as well as possible. As such, it 
was improper to proffer a frontend-specific solution to an issue that is 
important to all frontends--especially one that does not function within 
OSIS or TEI.

--Chris