[sword-devel] Remote Repositories

[Jonathan Morgan]

Hi Troy,

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 11:24 AM, Troy A. Griffitts <scribe at crosswire.org>wrote:

> I have 2 things I'd like for us to discuss and finalize fairly quickly
> if that's at all possible ;)
>
> 1) As we discussed in the past, I think we all agreed it would be useful
> to add an official .conf entry for navigating to the purchase URL for a
> locked module.  Currently the user has to scan the About section to find
> this.  If we added:
>
> UnlockURL=
>
> would it be feasible we could have fairly rapid support for spawning an
> HTML viewer to this URL from our major frontends?
>

This makes sense.  If it were standardised we might put it in for BPBible
0.5, but I wouldn't guarantee it at this stage.

Is this something that could get out of date?  A publisher changes their URL
schema and suddenly that link no longer works?

2) Current Events:  I'd like to have a:
>
> NEWS.txt
>
> or some such file recognized at the root of our remote module
> repositories which allow publishers to let interested users know what's
> going on at their institution.  I envision a simple memo control showing
> the contents of this file in our applications' installer view when
> showing a repository's resources.
>
> I can add a method to InstallMgr's InstallSource class: SWBuf getNews(),
> or something similar.
>
>
> I have ideas about how publishers could support multiple languages:
>
> NEWS.txt
> NEWS.txt.de
> NEWS.txt.es
>
> with proper defaults and such, but does this concept sound like
> something we'd all be willing to implement, and in what timeframe?
>

Several thoughts on this:
1. Is this the most appropriate place to display it?
2. Will it be kept up to date? (I get frustrated by websites, etc. that have
news older than a year or two old, and are either no longer doing anything
or have given up telling me new things).
3. Is it duplicating information shown elsewhere?  Does it mean just another
thing for publishers to remember to keep up to date?
4. What degree of formatting will be needed/wanted in this news?

I would be inclined to suggest the following instead:
1. Module repositories have some kind of a description or about section.
This states the purpose of repository, etc., and is hopefully much less
likely to change or be out of date.
2. Module repositories can have a URL to the main site for that module
repository.  This could be the main page of the publisher or a special page
for the SWORD repository or whatever else the publisher chooses.  If they
want to have news I would probably expect it more to be on a feed on a
webpage somewhere than in InstallMgr.  This also means those who come across
it who are not using SWORD get the same information, and there are no
compromises to force-fit the news to what frontends will support.

You could support something like this with a fairly standard conf file at
the base of the repository.  Maybe other fields could be included as well
(such as a display name for the repository), but it seems to me a bit
arbitrary to have news and nothing else, and I'm not sure that I follow the
reasoning.

Thoughts?

Jon


> Hope everyone has had a very wonderful Christmas filled with family,
> friends, and love.
>
>
> Troy
>
>
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