[sword-devel] Making better use of the CrossWire GitHub project ?

[Arnaud Vié]

Hi everyone,

Having dived into the whole crosswire ecosystem recently, I'm at the same
time impressed at the quality of the tools provided (in particular the OSIS
standard and the JSword lib, as I've been working in Java), and worried by
what I perceive as a lack of dynamism around it's development and
difficulty to contribute.

By "lack of dynamism" I of course don't mean to criticise the time anyone
spends (as we contribute to a free ecosystem, we all have lives keeping us
busy elsewhere), but rather to highlight how rough it is for external
enthusiastic people to join.
For example, I'd like to contribute evolutions to the OSIS standard around
versification systems, but I have no idea where to make such proposals, as
there is only a mailing list dead since 2015
<http://crosswire.org/pipermail/osis-core/>, a few wiki pages
<https://wiki.crosswire.org/Category:OSIS> and a few downloadable documents
<https://crosswire.org/osis/> which are supposedly the latest version.

I think a lot of that could be improved by making better use of the
crosswire github project <https://github.com/crosswire>, which is nowadays
the first contact most young developers will have with these crosswire
projects.

I'd like to propose a few changes, get your opinions, and volunteer to
execute them if everyone agrees.

   - *Revive the jsword github repository*.
   That includes
      - Backporting the relevant changes from the andbible fork
      <https://github.com/AndBible/jsword/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed>
      (excluding android-specific stuff - which I already mostly removed in my
      last PR there).
      - Setting up a release process to publish the jar on a maven
      repository.
      - Setting up a clear branching model and writing clear contribution
      guidelines.
      - Having a team of several people familiar with Java development to
      review PRs or answer questions in the issue tracker. I obviously
volunteer,
      but more people is always the best.

      - *Create a new Git repository for the OSIS specification*.
   Must contain :
      - In Git, the OSIS XSD schema, and the functional specification
      (basically, the contents of the current manual) in markdown or asciidoc
      format.
      So that contributions to the standard may be opened as pull requests,
      reviewed, potentially stored as separate branches, etc.
      - A wiki tab where all relevant OSIS-related resources from the
      crosswire wiki should be copied.

      - Ideally, I'd also suggest *moving the C++ sword code to github*.
   Having it only on an old SVN repo
   <https://crosswire.org/svn/sword/trunk/>, not browsable or searchable
   online, really harms its visibility. I used a little bit of SVN while in
   engineering school 12 years ago, but I doubt that most young devs nowadays
   even know about it.

But for this last C++ part, I suspect it has bigger impact on current
developers, since Troy is still actively developing it and using the Jira
bugtracker for this part - so there is no urgent need to change.
I'm really more worried about the jsword repo (it breaks my heart to see it
dead since 2019) and having a visible and versioned location for the OSIS
standard.

Please let me know your thoughts !
And whoever is currently admin of the github project, would you be willing
to grant me some permissions on the jsword repo and a new "osis-spec" repo
to start setting up all of this ?

Regards,

Arnaud Vié
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