[sword-devel] 3-letter language character codes

[DM Smith]

On 11/09/2009 04:49 PM, Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Nov 2009, DM Smith wrote:
>    
>> I don't know all the history, and what I know may be a bit faulty.
>>      
> [<clip>]
>
> A bit faulty or not, it gives an explanation to the situation. However,
> we have a more practical problem. We should be able keep the modules and
> frontends in sync.
I agree. Here are the issues that I see. There may be others and these 
might not be important.
a) A module in a repository, we will assume, has a valid language code 
at the time it was created, but it might not be valid at a later date. 
We have seen several codes in the beta repository be obsoleted.

A user may have one of these modules for a long time, not noticing an 
update that merely changes the language code to the current correct value.

To solve this, the old code needs to be kept in so far as possible. (It 
might be re-assigned, but it appears that there is care taken to 
minimize or prevent that.)

b) The release of updates of the SWORD engine takes longer than any of 
us wants. While we agree on frequent releases, we don't do that. This 
indicates that the we either tie language codes to what the engine knows 
or we find a different mechanism.

c) 3rd party solutions have their own goals which might not align with 
module releases and updates. For example, they may not update as 
frequently as needed or they may only include currently valid codes.

d) Some distributions of Linux have been notoriously slow in updating 
SWORD apps. There is no reason to expect that such an update mechanism 
can be relied upon.

I see a couple of solutions, both based on CrossWire maintaining 
internationalized lists of module languages, current and past. This can 
be somewhat programmatic, grabbing the unique set of language codes, and 
constructing a filtered list of these languages (perhaps using the code 
I supplied earlier.)

It could be place in mods.d.tar.gz or some other well known place for 
download. This is the only solution that I see that solves all the problems.

JSword's solution is to try to keep current with the CrossWire 
production modules and hope that we encompass beta before they get into 
production. If we slip, we catalog the "new" languages as "Unknown", 
that is a code of "und." For most of our users, this accurately reflects 
their knowledge/opinion of the language. I think that is a fairly 
graceful fallback.

In Him,
     DM


>   Whatever the module version, users should see only
> the correct name of the language (or a language code if frontend is too
> old to have the name for the language). Is it possible? How?
>
>    Yours,
> 	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
> 	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)
>
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