[sword-devel] Sword support of indents and line breaks

[John Austin]

On 04/13/2013 05:35 PM, Peter von Kaehne wrote:
> Can I try and summarise what I think is going on here?
>
> Basis of problem:
>
> 1) CrossWire has a whitespace/title/poetry problem which has been
> discussed at nauseam for many years. But it has neither been thoroughly
> resolved nor even isolated. Various parties have blamed each other -
> module makers, osis2mod maintainer, filter maintainer, frontend
> developers (and maybe others, including bystanders) DOI - module maker
> and happy to blame anyone, including myself as long as it finally
> improves.

Yes...

>
> 2) IBT had a specific need and had someone in their midst willing to
> cater to that need, using our CrossWire's efforts but was miffed by
> problem (1)

Not miffed exactly (well, ok yes) but mainly just baffled and needing a 
working solution.

>
> 3) IBT - outside of the Wycliffe/UBS "tradition" of using Paratext - has
> developed it own use of USFM with specific rules about markup, sometimes
> breaking semantic rules.

IBT's text's are mostly (all?) within Wycliffe/UBS and use Paratext. But 
much of the markup is well more than a decade (or 2?) old. Some is SFM, 
not USFM. USFM is more standardized.

>
> The problem grows:
>
> 4) IBT's lead programmer decides to solve IBT's immediate problem by
> applying his own patches to sword and maintain his own version of
> libsword and OSIS with little or no communication with Sword people and
> no attempt to isolate and solve the underlying problem (1) either.

Only, not lead. The patches were mainly for av11n but yes, also a host 
of other features/fixes which did not exist in Sword at the time. The 
lack of communication and attempts to fix the underlying problem were 
due to a near total lack of experience and understanding. Imagine trying 
to understand and contribute to something as complex as Sword having no 
programming experience, no real knowledge of C++, or even what mundane 
things like svn were, not knowing Linux or how a repository system 
worked (or even what it was), and having 0 experience with programming 
collaboration of any kind. That was the situation. In fact, The Sword 
Project was truly the elementary school room, not the office (isn't Open 
Source awesome!?) It was evidence of God working the impossible that the 
lone wolf hacks worked at all. But they worked. And pretty well too.

>
> The problem becomes apparent:
>
> 5) People in IBT's area start to use smartphones and Mac's and
> subsequently IBT's offer of xulsword is not sufficient anymore - making
> (1) obvious to everyone and letting (4) fail.

Quite true. Especially requests for offline smart-phone apps.

>
> The problem becomes a bunfight:
>
> 6) Instead of looking at (1), (2) and (3) respectively and finding both
> the remaining whitespace bugs + fix IBT's "dodgy" USFM encoding we are
> fighting for two positions which are actually both not particularly
> good.

Right again. My best answer? Prayer.