[sword-devel] Installing new/updated locales like we do for modules?

[Peter von Kaehne]

On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 14:30 +1100, Nic Carter wrote: 
> 
> On 01/03/2011, at 12:23 PM, David Haslam wrote:

> > For anyone with a slow connection, this would save time considerably, since
> > the files containing the localization strings must be a lot smaller than the
> > download for the whole front-end.
> 
> yup, for the names of the books of the Bible, this would simply be text files [..]

I think this would be useful for two reasons

It is a reasonably common thing that we add a locale to sword, but the
releases are not that frequent. If we get a new Bible text which
includes cross references, obtaining/creating a sword locale is usually
a must to get the cross references to work. 

So, it would be nice to be able to load them like modules. On the other
side, my understanding is that every time a SWMgr is created the whole
bunch of existing locales is read, which can be a bit of a slow process.
At least when I called vs2osisref multiple (thousands of) times in a
shell script to fix references in an OSIS text I could speed up my shell
script considerably by removing installed locales down to the one I
needed - from running 2 hrs down to 10 mins. 

Using the bindings and creating only one SWMgr made the whole problem
for my purposes academic, but I gather that proper frontends still have
a multiplicity of instances created and running at any given time?

So, if locales were given "module" status, for downlod via module
manager, we could 

a) add them without waiting for a new release
b) potentially (dependent on if my understanding is right) significantly
speed up start up of frontend by only installing the locales actually
wanted/needed by the user.

Peter