[sword-devel] Announcing Sword++

[Manfred Bergmann]

If you want a nice new, clean and convenient API, why don’t you build one on top of the current API?


Manfred


> Am 28.09.2016 um 16:49 schrieb Konstantin Maslyuk <kostyamaslyuk at gmail.com>:
> 
> Thank you, Jaak, for your good starting. I still hope that your knowledge in C++ development and Troy's experience in Sword development would unite in development of next major libsword iteration (reword libsword2). I think you both have many great ideas for that. 
> 
> I also expect from libsword2 more convenient api. Since we managed to work with existing, it leave many questions and unobvious things (SWMgr that is actually iterator, Upper/Lower bound that do not say where is module beginning for new ones). A lot of code in Sword is hard to maintain, only few people knows how it actually works. It is not look like good C++ code. And it will never evolve if we will focus on elder devices.
> 
> So I suggest to not extinguish any kind of energy here but to support. It is so little here.
> 
> As for me, i like elder devices, and at this moment they are in my priority.
> 
> 
> Blessings.
> От: Jaak Ristioja <mailto:jaak at ristioja.ee>
> Отправлено: ‎25.‎09.‎2016 21:56
> Кому: SWORD Developers' Collaboration Forum <mailto:sword-devel at crosswire.org>
> Тема: [sword-devel] Announcing Sword++
> 
> Hello!
> 
> Sometime in May this year my efforts to improve the Sword library as the
> backend for BibleTime led me to create branch or fork of the Sword
> codebase, which I eventually called Sword++. The main goals for this
> were to (with respect to BibleTime development) improve the API, build
> system and overall code quality, modernize, and to try to fix any bugs I
> find when refactoring and reviewing the code. With experience as a C++
> backend engineer and being no Sword expert, my refactoring effort also
> serves the purpose of educating myself about Sword and its internals.
> While I'm just starting out and have barely touched the amount of work
> that needs to be done, I've already accumulated over 200 new commits to
> the Sword++ repository so far. So this seems to be a more-or-less
> reasonable time to publicly announce my publicly before the situation
> gets too awkward.
> 
> Before I proceed, I want to emphasize that none of this is meant to
> split or even stir up anything negative in the community. However,
> Sword++ is an initiative to stop and reverse the current bit-rot; it is
> more of a rescue effort and not a rebel event. Due to the sheer amount
> of work that needs to and can be done to reach these goals, it is
> evidently impractical for me to push and wait for every such change to
> work its way through the issue tracker and/or sword-devel and reach SVN
> trunk. To work around this costly threshold for contributing to the
> Sword library, Sword++ is now here.
> 
> Sword++ is not officially related to CrossWire. The code currently lives
> at https://github.com/swordxx/swordxx and as the initiator I'm currently
> idling alone on the #sword++ channel on FreeNode IRC. Feel free to
> contribute, file bug reports, pull requests etc. Also feel free to
> cherry-pick or merge any fixes back to Sword. I don't think I will (or
> have time to) flood sword-devel with emails about every bug (or
> technical, design or architectural issue) I find. I will try to notify
> about most severe security issues. Follow the git log if you're interested.
> 
> The code is in sync with enhancements in the Sword SVN trunk and for now
> I'll try to keep it that way, although I've changed the layout of source
> files etc extensively which makes merging harder. I'm currently
> targeting standard C++14, POSIX and Linux, with everything else having
> lower priority due to Sword++ currently having only one active
> developer. I've also dropped all the language bindings (which I don't
> intend on maintaining together with the Sword++ master branch), a bunch
> of legacy and unused code, tools and utilities etc. MSVC project files
> and autotools were dropped from the build system, which is now only
> based on CMake. Ftplib support was also dropped, cURL, CLucene 2, bzip2,
> xz and zlib are now unconditionally required by Sword++. There are also
> some API changes so switching from Sword to Sword++ requires some
> effort. See the git log for details and more.
> 
> There is a lot of uncertainty because this is just the beginning of the
> process. Currently Sword++ must be considered unstable. I haven't tested
> it much at runtime. I'm mostly doing code review, modernizing, fixing
> bugs and compiler warnings and static analysis warnings,
> despaghettification and deduplication of code, improving the API etc etc
> etc. Sword++ will try to stay compatible with existing Sword modules,
> but will probably propose amendments to the file formats and download
> protocols (e.g. to get rid of parsing the potentially fragile HTML of
> directory listings generated by the Apache HTTP server).
> 
> I hold in high respect both CrossWire and all who made the Sword library
> possible and am grateful for ALL of you who have enabled or contributed
> to Sword, and your work. I hope the Sword++ initiative will benefit our
> developer community, the end-users and so on.
> 
> Glory be to God!
> 
> Thank you and many blessings,
> Jaak Ristioja
> 
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