[sword-devel] Announcing Sword++

[Jaak Ristioja]

On 25.09.2016 22:50, Matěj Cepl wrote:
> On 2016-09-25, 18:54 GMT, Jaak Ristioja wrote:
>> 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++.
> 
> Well, aside from the fear that it will kill any upgrades in most 
> Linux distros (I don’t expect many maintainers eager to maintain 
> two libsword* packages), no comments.

Why no comments? What do you mean by "kill any upgrades"? Sword++ does
not strive to be API compatible with Sword, because the API is something
I think that needs to be changed at least to some extent anyway. For
example we use the "swordxx" namespace instead of "sword", have
renamed/removed/added some classes/functions etc. And of course it will
be a new library: "libswordxx" instead of "libsword". Distros will not
have to deal with two different libraries having the same name.

Could you please elaborate on your fears? Personally, I'm not afraid nor
see any reason to be afraid. Foremost because I don't think packaging is
a hard task unless library developers make things difficult for
downstream by some non-standard practices. Second, I introduced Sword++
as being in very early stages of development. It was not a release
announcement. So we have some reasonable time to work out any details,
if we ever get to a release. We are considering using Sword++ instead of
Sword for BibleTime 2.12, just because it will (hopefully) be more
developer-friendly to use, more stable etc. I don't see a reason for
distros to reject newer versions of BibleTime just because it uses
Sword++ instead of Sword. Of course we need to communicate dependency
changes to packagers, but I don't think this will be a huge problem. The
alternative might be to bundle a copy of Sword++ with BibleTime.

Best regards,
J