[sword-devel] Namespace Proposal re eBible - collissions, duplication, clean-up etc

[Peter von Kaehne]

Dear all,

Looking at the flurry of emails from the last few weeks I am thinking
if I was Michael, I would start hitting my head against the wall. 

There are quite clearly two kinds of problems:

1) Things that stop us actually putting the repo formally online
2) Things that would be nice to get fixed

And right now we (i.e. mostly Michael) get(s) bogged down on (2) while
(1) is what we/he really should concentrate upon.

Recent emails re duplications (I started it, so I tap my nose) are a
case in point. If we could ensure that no module of Michael is ever
installed on top of a module from us (in the widest sense - IBT,
Xiphos, CrossWire, NET) then things would be a lot smoother already.
Yes we might have a multitude of modules in triplicate, but that is
then a minor inconvenience which can be sorted at leisure instead of
delaying the start up of the repo. Given that we have 1000s of modules
between us, it is likely that we will find showstopping duplications
for some time to come - unless we do something drastic:

Proposal:

1) Add a namespace element to ModuleName and datapath. Initially we do
this solely for eBible, but we can then expand that to other
repos/publishers. This removes all risk of duplication upon existing
installs - yes the user will then have two KJVs or whatever, but no
corruption of indeces, or mess of his private notes. So Michael's texts
should all have a Modulename like SpaRV2009ebib and a data path
sparv2009ebib. 

2) Enact some discipline prior to posting 
a) - no new non-showstopping threads on ebible until we got the repo
online. 
b) - thread discipline. I am very interested to see eBible happening,
but I find it hard to follow the multitude of threads. 
c) - bugs in frontends are bugs in frontends and not eBible's problems,
even if triggered by eBible. 

Thanks