The following email was solicited by one of our longstanding
contributors of work here at CrossWire, and, despite the brief personal
comments at the beginning, ought to be useful and interesting to
everyone seeking to serve here together.
As stated at the beginning, it is a very good thing to periodically
evaluate our direction and vision in service for our Lord-- both
short-term specifics, and long term purpose.
I have been excited to hear in personal and public email and in irc chat
in #sword on freenode.net (shameless encouragement to join, if you're
not a regular) that God has placed similar desires and vision in people
who desire to share in ministry together. It is a wonderful thing to
see our God bring people together in common vision and likeminded
service for His Kingdom.
-Troy A. Griffitts.
--- Begin Message ---
Hey Martin,
It's always good to re-evaluate our vision and direction, so thanks for
giving me the opportunity to write some thoughts.
since we don't seem to meet in IRC....
You sleep too early. :)
How are you doing these days? Do you work for school, job, any news? We just
got a new (used, 3 yrs) car (Renault Megane), and it rocks =).
Awesome! Congratulations! My old '94 Celica is still running ok. It's
paid for, so I'm happy with it while it still runs!
DM said he expects a new Sword CD to be released soon. Is that true?
Yeah, we have a number of outstanding CD orders that I need to fill, so
I told him my plan to cut a new CD with the the latest BibleCS once we
release.
We really need to have a group meeting about the CD layout. I have
never been happy with binary distribution on linux. I'd like for us to
discuss ideas of how best to distribute our products on CD.
I've got a couple questions regarding Sword: What do you expect for the
development of Sword (the C++ lib) and its module library in the next years?
...
What features do you want to
be implemented and when do you expect that to happen?
(I've learned that 'when' in volunteer opensource development is not an
intelligible concept)
Here are my 'whats'...
Completion of VerseTreeKey class to support exposing a genbook as a Bible.
zGenBook
Expanded support for references. Currently sword support only generic
(not tied to a specific module) Bible references. Additional support
for generic references of any type (Bible.KJV:John.3.16,
Person:Paul.of.Tarsus, Strongs:G1591). Additional support for
references to a specific sword module name
([EMAIL PROTECTED]:John.3.16). Which might fall back to another module
if the user didn't have the specific module installed.
Mapping system between reference systems (Bible.KJV <--> Bible.LXX)..
Martin, you've done some good work recently to consolidating these
reference systems. I've been meaning to talk with you about your recent
work. I had planned to suggest that we might try using code like:
RawLD::createModule("Scheme1ToScheme2");
RawLD *mod = new RawLD(modname);
for (...) {
mod->setKey(fromOSISid);
mod->setEntry(toOSISid);
}
So we might not introduce a new dependency of sqlite.
Possibly some way to trigger lucene index fields to be created with a
new filter classification. This would modularize field creation so new
search fields could be added simply by adding a new filter. Currently
we have 4 fields that are hardcoded in the creation index creation code.
It would be nice to split these 4 up into small, selfcontained filters
which generate their field text, so the index create code doesn't have
to know about any of this stuff, and we could add a new one without
having to know all the details of the index creation code.
Finally, the roadmap in jira is still valid. I'd like to do a 2.0
release soon that has the API interface normalized. It's gotten pretty
inconsistent over the 15 years of coding.
Do you see any changes to the development model?
What development model? :) I've pretty much conceded to the fact the we
are like all other opensource projects. There is a very small group of
people who do all the work, and everyone else just complains. There is
no solution.
Actually, what HAS worked really well for us is people OWNING small
components of the project. I like the fact that you've taken ownership
of our Hebrew support (though I was going to chide you about using <br>
in the .conf of the WLC :) ). People own all kinds of subprojects like
Bibletime, Gnomesword, JSword, MacSword, etc. That seems to work out
great. Like, for example, Daniel owned our autotools build system for a
long time. What a great blessing! He hounded me forever to switch, and
persisted even when I refused to switch until the autotools build system
allowed the same functionality and options as the previous hacked
makefile system. He owned it, developed it over time, and sword would
never be accepted in so many distros had it not been for his work. I
still have next to no clue how autotools works :) (side note: He's been
really busy with other things lately and I've been wanting our build
system to be able to build a debug version WITHOUT optimization, for a
long time (there is a jira bug report). Debugging is pretty much
useless when optimization is turned on. I added a silly debug.sh script
which finds all makefiles and changes -O2 to -O0 so I can effectively
debug. It's a longstanding issue and I am not an expert at autotools).
I don't want to become an expert at autotools. I'd like for Daniel--
or if he cannot commit the time any longer, for more pressing service
elsewhere, them someone else-- to own that component. Chris has owned
our unicode support for quite some time. I remember sitting with him
about 4 years back in San Francisco researching how UTF8 worked and
writing some prototype filters together. It was a blast. But he's
taken that stuff and expanded it and maintains it, and I've hardly
looked at it since then; same with ICU, except I didn't help at all on
that stuff. The bindings stuff is owned by... er, I'm not even sure
these days! But people are updating them. We need to get them access
to the bindings directory in the repository so they can maintain stuff
as they like.
So, I guess, OWNERSHIP is the key word. I'd like to encourage people to
commit to own, maintain, and expand an area where they are interested
and feel led to commit part of their life. I realize our lives are
important and we need to consider how we spend the short time that God
gives us here. We have many orphaned projects that need owners:
SwordReader (CE Version), QPSword (Qtopia/OPIE version)-- though Dagger
sounds like it is being regularly updated, which is nice, and others.
I'd really appreciate to read your opinions and visions for the nearer and
farer future of Sword. This is no attempt to change, just to learn. =)
Thanks Martin. I'm still looking forward to finishing up this stuff,
normalizing the API calls, and then start on some real research work.
I'm really excited about using the engine to produce some cool next
generation tools-- one of which is a facility for a scholarly online
community where they can do textual research and contribute their expert
knowledge toward an open repository of data anyone can download and use
for research. I see a line coming up soon where my hope is that we can
cross from focusing on features to the engine, to instead focus on both
better content and new tools which use the engine.
I hope this gives you an idea of where my heart desires to lead efforts
at CrossWire. Our purpose statement remains steadfast, to be a resource
to Bible Societies and other ministry organizations by giving them
technical tools and skilled time to help them reach their domain with
Christ. I personally have a desire to facilitate scholarly communities
and believe this will help domain experts and scholars at these
organizations collaborate and foster the next generation of content for
ministry in an ever more data-centric society.
My prayer request this week is that we would all have a complimentary
vision for serving our Lord-- not identical, necessarily, just
complimentary.
Oh, and I have a 12 page paper to write to finish my summer course,
which is due Monday at 10am. :)
This is alot to read for a prayer request, so I trust you'll stick it at
the end or someplace that doesn't disrupt the flow of our usual prayer time.
Thanks again, Martin. Looking forward to praying with you all.
-Troy.
May God bless you.
mg
--- End Message ---
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