I think Peter's suggestions are very good, for the most part. The lack of an "alpha" area where authors can make more or less immediate updates when problems are addressed is a serious sore point. It's why I put up a public repository of my own in the first place, where a half dozen of the 30 modules available are not built by me -- because things go into today's beta repository and never come out, and once there... well, everyone reading this list has seen me ask for certain updates to be done, and has seen how long it takes any of those requests to be handled. Case in point, some 3 months ago, discussion was heard about whether the GnomeSword manual module actually belongs in the Crosswire repositories at all, it was generally decided that ultimately that's not the right place for such a thing, and I (lacking privs) asked that someone just remove it. It's still there. And aging steadily: 2.3.2 is in my own repo (minimal updates), and 2.3.3 will happen this Sunday (quite a few updates).
By comparison to the beta repository, Peter could give me an updated FarBibAtlas or FarTV this evening and it would be available to the world by sometime tomorrow. But wouldn't it be best if Peter could give the world his update on his own? This past Sunday, I wrote some paragraphs to Troy privately, to talk a bit about an automatic upload facility that could be integrated into the Sword lib without really much difficulty. (I may try my hand at that code next month, but at the moment I'm cramming a lot of work into getting structural GS improvements made before BibleTech.) And if that were in place, my GS changes to put it to use would be 20 or 30 lines of code, and possibly not that much. As a technical problem, this "publish" concept is not too tough and it just leaves the political problems, such as DM mentioned -- notably, malicious people uploading crap, or uploading modules that can't properly be distributed by Crosswire. That's largely solvable in a technical manner, too, by careful setting of the upload repository's permissions. Assuming that perms on the upload repository are clamped down, the remaining technical/political/personal combination problem regards putting in some small bits of infrastructure so as to notify the repository owner of newly-arrived modules in need of being approved and pushed around appropriately. A quick first pass at that resulted in an adequate if not very featureful cron-driven shell script that does the job -- less than 30 lines. Indeed, if there existed such an upload capability in the Sword lib today, I would be maintaining an open "publishers' repository" by this weekend, directly usable by at least GS and any other UI that implements the interface. (BTW, if one cares to leave the perms rather wide open, then the upload repository is also a download repository, for everyone else to get at the new modules.) I am thinking through these sorts of problems because I am again considering how to integrate the idea of users authoring their own modules, and how they could get them published in some sense, where friends/students/the world could get at them. Whenever I have queried GS users about needed features, authoring tools have consistently been a top request, and I have been woefully lax about getting to it. There are 150 Bibles available, but it would be nice if any respected author could distribute a sermon series or Bible study series in Sword format, in commentary or genbook form. It would enhance Sword's PR value immensely if people saw that they could readily contribute to the body of work available for study. I believe that as long as it's difficult for Joe Random to produce and distribute a Sword module (cf. Peter, who succeeds because he is bull-headed enough to keep pushing), that kind of community critical mass will not come into being. _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
