[sword-devel] Concerns about Alternate Versification

[Jonathan Morgan]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Chris Little <chrislit at crosswire.org> wrote:
> Basically, alternate versification support is phase 1. Mapping between
> versifications is phase 2.
>
> Jonathan Morgan wrote:
>>
>> I am also concerned about the choice of using Genbooks to represent
>> books, just based (as far as I can tell) on the fact that we already
>> have Genbook support.  Is there any technical reason that makes the
>> Genbook reference "/Gen/3/2" superior?  Remember that this is not
>> being displayed to the user at all, so we are at liberty to choose any
>> representation we like.  The Genbook representation allows all sorts
>> of invalid data - I could have /Gen/2, or /Gen/something or other/some
>> random text/2/3.
>
> Perhaps you're not very familiar with different versification schemes, but
> there are common cases where chapters are identified as letters or by words.
> See Esther in an NRSVA or Sirach in virtually any translation for examples
> of these, respectively.
>
> However, GenBooks are an internal format and their key representation is not
> relevant to you, as a frontend developer, since you should be able to access
> them via the same methods as any other Bible. The translation from one key
> format to another (/b/c/v to/from b c:v) will be handled within the library.

I'm happy to accept Chris' assurance that versification is more
complex that I believed it, and so Genbooks are a reasonably good fit.

Jon