[sword-devel] SWORD Engine - critical bugs and pending releases

[Matthew Talbert]

> Xiphos is planning to ship with a patched SWORD library that properly
> handles upper ASCII/Unicode characters in path names.  That patch,
> though, sits on top of the current head of SVN and not on 1.6.2. This
> patch introduces a dependency on GLib2, which is fine for Xiphos
> because it already ships with that, but it is unreasonable to expect
> BibleTime, and even more BibleCS, to ship with that extra dependency.
> BibleTime could make a mirrored patch which leverages Qt and BibleCS
> could wrap another patch itself but doesn't that defeat the purpose of
> having the library?  With at least two (and maybe all three) planning
> a release in the near future, can we make fixing the UTF path problem
> a priority and get 1.6.3 shipped in the next 2-3 weeks so that the
> next releases of BT and Xiphos can ship with 1.6.3 in Windows as it is
> released and not be forced to rely on individual patches built on top
> of SVN code?

I have promised several times to work on this, but I have been unable
to devote any time lately to SWORD or Xiphos. However, I would like to
point out that a very good template for a future patch has been done
already by xulsword. You can see his work at
http://code.google.com/p/xulsword/source/browse/trunk/Cpp/swordMK/src/utilfuns/win32/dirent.cpp
The only real problem is that he is using Mozilla's runtime to convert
from UTF8 to UTF16 and so on. There are functions already in SWORD
that could do these conversions. With some simple modifications, this
code would solve the problem very well.

It's worth noting that clucene has the exact same issue (it was
reported on their bug tracker, but they closed it "won't fix").
xulsword has again created patches for clucene here:
http://code.google.com/p/xulsword/source/detail?r=48 Right now, in
Xiphos merely crashes if it tries to index in a file path affected by
this issue. I just have never gotten around to fixing it.

Matthew