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

[Michael H]

Re: Lack of momentum for OSIS.

OSIS as described on wikipedia is owned by a committee including United
Bible Societies, SIL International, and the Society of Biblical
Literature.

However, this team got together and created the version that is available,
then almost completely ignored it, and went back to the SFM tagging system
and then produced USFM, when turned into several more closely related XML
languages, but has become USX. There was in the UBS/SIL Paratext
translation program the ability to produce OSIS output until version 8, but
since about 2016, there is no use or mention of OSIS in Paratext.

A history and analysis of why this is published in Balisage 2021
conference:

https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol26/html/Robie01/BalisageVol26-Robie01.html

Even in 2024, the tagging language USFM remains the "primary" tool to
encode biblical works at almost all the organizations that produced OSIS.
There is no momentum for that committee to ever meet again. But the spec
has holes.

https://gitlab.com/cmahte/osis-users-manual-2.1

I started working on updating OSIS, and in the process received a reply
from someone at ABS or UBS that although the OSIS spec is copyrighted and
does not contain specific verbiage about reuse, I could and should consider
it licensed under creative commons BY-SA. (At the time, I wasn't seeking to
update OSIS, but freely copy from it in creating a successor or fork.)

This means that OSIS is both abandoned and available for adoption by a
successor body.  I've also since moved on from ever producing proposed
changes to it or a fork myself. IF I ever got far enough along to need a
formal spec, it would be extensions USFM or to OpenDocument or more
directly synonymous with that XML.  If you're interested, I'll dig up the
contact information, and pass it along. But I do have a copy re-edited into
USFM (or more specifically a draft version of PSFM... which means the way
tables are built in my text are unusual.) If there is an effort to update.
I can transform my work into LibreOffice Writer format.

I suggest it is time to consider an OSIS 3, or at least an OSIS 2.2 spec
that is owned by a successor organization instead of organizations that
effectively abandoned it.  That's the missing link which would provide a
mechanism to actually make changes to the standard.  People (including me)
keep doing this search and landing at Crosswire Bible society as the best
option for a new owner. But maybe who OWNS can be one of the topics
considered by a committee.

On Sat, Feb 17, 2024 at 9:47 AM Arnaud Vié <unas.zole+avie at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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