[sword-devel] Some questions about the WEB module

[Chris Little]

On 4/11/2012 3:11 PM, John Zaitseff wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have some questions about the WEB (World English Bible) module in the
> SWORD repository:
>
> 1. Who is the maintainer of this module?  The conf file does not list
>     anyone: it just lists the upstream source (www.ebible.org).

I maintain the WEB and associated translations modules.

> 2. Is that maintainer planning an update of the module?  I notice the
>     current upstream release was dated 5th April, 2012, just a few days ago.

In the near future, we'll have automatic updates of the WEB and certain 
other modules. But for the moment it is a manual process.

Do you know there to be meaningful updates to the text in the most 
recent revision(s)--meaningful meaning not changes to spaces or minor 
markup and not changes to the Apocrypha (since we don't support them in 
the current WEB module anyway)?

> 3. Does that maintainer release the finished OSIS text somewhere, or does he
>     or she simply use usfm2osis.pl (since the upstream WEB is in USFM
>     format)?  If so, where is that OSIS file?

I use usfm2osis.pl.

> 4. If the answer to (1) is Unknown, or the answer to (2) is No, would there
>     be objections to doing the work myself, with the results released to the
>     SWORD module repository?

Not that the offer is not appreciated, but it would save me literally no 
work to have someone else download the files and run usfm2osis.pl. :)

> 5. I note from the Wiki that usfm2osis.pl has limitations and/or bugs.  I
>     also see (from the sword-tools Subversion repository logs) that
>     usfm2osis.pl is currently being maintained by one chrislit.  Who is that?
>     If I manage to rework the script to eliminate the limitations, will my
>     patches be accepted?

I'm not the only maintainer of usfm2osis.pl, since there are half a 
dozen people doing minor maintenance on the program, but I'm the 
original author, so maybe any architectural faults can be attributed to 
me. One of the biggest problems with usfm2osis.pl is that it was not 
originally written for USFM and it grows piecemeal to target USFM input.

If you "rework" the script, I can probably safely say that your patches 
will not be accepted. If you submit patches to address specific 
shortcomings or bugs, there is a good chance that they will be 
committed. If you can be more specific about what you propose to do, 
someone on the list can probably identify how useful it would be.

One of my personal Summer projects will be to write a USFM to OSIS 
converter from scratch, but for that I won't be touching the 
usfm2osis.pl codebase. Given how much we use usfm2osis.pl and how well 
it does its job, we really can't have big changes to the existing code 
that cause regressions in functionality. (Abundant unit & regression 
tests will be a feature of the re-written converter, but for now, we 
have essentially nothing to identify when changes to the code have 
unintended consequences--aside from diff maybe.)

--Chris