On 04/13/2013 05:35 PM, Peter von Kaehne wrote:
Can I try and summarise what I think is going on here?
Basis of problem:
1) CrossWire has a whitespace/title/poetry problem which has been
discussed at nauseam for many years. But it has neither been thoroughly
resolved nor even isolated. Various parties have blamed each other -
module makers, osis2mod maintainer, filter maintainer, frontend
developers (and maybe others, including bystanders) DOI - module maker
and happy to blame anyone, including myself as long as it finally
improves.
Yes...
2) IBT had a specific need and had someone in their midst willing to
cater to that need, using our CrossWire's efforts but was miffed by
problem (1)
Not miffed exactly (well, ok yes) but mainly just baffled and needing a
working solution.
3) IBT - outside of the Wycliffe/UBS "tradition" of using Paratext - has
developed it own use of USFM with specific rules about markup, sometimes
breaking semantic rules.
IBT's text's are mostly (all?) within Wycliffe/UBS and use Paratext. But
much of the markup is well more than a decade (or 2?) old. Some is SFM,
not USFM. USFM is more standardized.
The problem grows:
4) IBT's lead programmer decides to solve IBT's immediate problem by
applying his own patches to sword and maintain his own version of
libsword and OSIS with little or no communication with Sword people and
no attempt to isolate and solve the underlying problem (1) either.
Only, not lead. The patches were mainly for av11n but yes, also a host
of other features/fixes which did not exist in Sword at the time. The
lack of communication and attempts to fix the underlying problem were
due to a near total lack of experience and understanding. Imagine trying
to understand and contribute to something as complex as Sword having no
programming experience, no real knowledge of C++, or even what mundane
things like svn were, not knowing Linux or how a repository system
worked (or even what it was), and having 0 experience with programming
collaboration of any kind. That was the situation. In fact, The Sword
Project was truly the elementary school room, not the office (isn't Open
Source awesome!?) It was evidence of God working the impossible that the
lone wolf hacks worked at all. But they worked. And pretty well too.
The problem becomes apparent:
5) People in IBT's area start to use smartphones and Mac's and
subsequently IBT's offer of xulsword is not sufficient anymore - making
(1) obvious to everyone and letting (4) fail.
Quite true. Especially requests for offline smart-phone apps.
The problem becomes a bunfight:
6) Instead of looking at (1), (2) and (3) respectively and finding both
the remaining whitespace bugs + fix IBT's "dodgy" USFM encoding we are
fighting for two positions which are actually both not particularly
good.
Right again. My best answer? Prayer.
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