[sword-devel] Announcing Sword++

Wed Sep 28 07:49:58 MST 2016

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.

-----Исходное сообщение-----
От: "Jaak Ristioja" <jaak �� ristioja.ee>
Отправлено: ‎25.‎09.‎2016 21:56
Кому: "SWORD Developers' Collaboration Forum" <sword-devel �� 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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