[sword-devel] GnomeSword is dead. Long live Xiphos.

[Karl Kleinpaste]

FYI.

As the GnomeSword team has approached its goal of the WIN32 port, the
question was raised about its name.  Neither "GNOME" nor "Sword"
necessarily has a lot of meaning (notwithstanding the project name),
even to Linux users, who may not know that their desktop scheme has a
name; it was expressed to me not long ago that "GnomeSword" sounds like
a Dungeons&Dragons program.  I'm such a Linux geek that I had never
noticed that until it was pointed out.

So we set about finding a replacement name.  The name chosen by a
committee of about a dozen is Xiphos, that is, ξίφος, one of several
Greek words for Sword.  Credit to Martin Zibricky for coming up with it.
This both removes the mental dependency on GNOME (though we use its
libraries, of course) and eliminates a common source of confusion with
other Windows software such as e-Sword.

We are in mid-conversion now.  SourceForge is in progress to finish
their data center move, San Francisco -> Chicago, and the portion of
their infrastructure that handles project purge and removal is not
available, hence we are not able right this instant to complete the
takeover of the existing-but-stillborn SourceForge "xiphos" project
name.  So we are slightly schizophrenic until they finish (schedule not
known).  That's OK, we can spackle over the semantic cracks pretty well.

We are aiming for our 3.0 release in a week or three, once our graphics
guys can do a number on program and website imagery.

--karl