On 4/11/2012 3:11 PM, John Zaitseff wrote:
Hi,

I have some questions about the WEB (World English Bible) module in the
SWORD repository:

1. Who is the maintainer of this module?  The conf file does not list
    anyone: it just lists the upstream source (www.ebible.org).

I maintain the WEB and associated translations modules.

2. Is that maintainer planning an update of the module?  I notice the
    current upstream release was dated 5th April, 2012, just a few days ago.

In the near future, we'll have automatic updates of the WEB and certain other modules. But for the moment it is a manual process.

Do you know there to be meaningful updates to the text in the most recent revision(s)--meaningful meaning not changes to spaces or minor markup and not changes to the Apocrypha (since we don't support them in the current WEB module anyway)?

3. Does that maintainer release the finished OSIS text somewhere, or does he
    or she simply use usfm2osis.pl (since the upstream WEB is in USFM
    format)?  If so, where is that OSIS file?

I use usfm2osis.pl.

4. If the answer to (1) is Unknown, or the answer to (2) is No, would there
    be objections to doing the work myself, with the results released to the
    SWORD module repository?

Not that the offer is not appreciated, but it would save me literally no work to have someone else download the files and run usfm2osis.pl. :)

5. I note from the Wiki that usfm2osis.pl has limitations and/or bugs.  I
    also see (from the sword-tools Subversion repository logs) that
    usfm2osis.pl is currently being maintained by one chrislit.  Who is that?
    If I manage to rework the script to eliminate the limitations, will my
    patches be accepted?

I'm not the only maintainer of usfm2osis.pl, since there are half a dozen people doing minor maintenance on the program, but I'm the original author, so maybe any architectural faults can be attributed to me. One of the biggest problems with usfm2osis.pl is that it was not originally written for USFM and it grows piecemeal to target USFM input.

If you "rework" the script, I can probably safely say that your patches will not be accepted. If you submit patches to address specific shortcomings or bugs, there is a good chance that they will be committed. If you can be more specific about what you propose to do, someone on the list can probably identify how useful it would be.

One of my personal Summer projects will be to write a USFM to OSIS converter from scratch, but for that I won't be touching the usfm2osis.pl codebase. Given how much we use usfm2osis.pl and how well it does its job, we really can't have big changes to the existing code that cause regressions in functionality. (Abundant unit & regression tests will be a feature of the re-written converter, but for now, we have essentially nothing to identify when changes to the code have unintended consequences--aside from diff maybe.)

--Chris

_______________________________________________
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

Reply via email to