[sword-devel] OSIS Bible Name guidelines ?

[Chris Little]

Tonny Kohar wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Is there somekind of name guidelines for OSIS module eg: KJV (King
> James Version), ESV (English Standard Versions), etc ?
> I mean the naming convention and the use of special character
> - is it must be 3 or 4 letter eg: KJV, NIV,ESV, NASB, UKJV for short name ?

Standard OSIS codes for Bible abbreviations are given on page 126 of the 
OSIS manual.

OSIS identifiers (ideally) have the format:
Bible.<language code>.<publisher/translator>.<name/abbreviation>.<year>

These should be given to the extent possible, e.g.:
Bible.en.ABS.CEV.1995
Bible.en.KJV.1611
etc.

Sword module IDs (which are a completely unrelated matter) don't have a 
particular limit, but do have a particular format. With a few 
exceptions, all non-English, non-Greek/Hebrew/ms. language modules have 
a prefix of the first 3 letters of their name in English (e.g. Ger for 
German, Fre for French, Fin for Finnish). When there are multiple 
notable revisions of a translation, the 4-digit year is suffixed. We 
also avoid use of the genitive -s in module names (at least when the 
possessed object is not part of the name), thus "Strong" not "Strongs", 
"Nave" not "Naves", "Smith" not "Smiths", etc.

IDs are limited to the characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and _.

> - How about long name eg: King James Version, is there any limit of max letter ?

There is no stated maximum, but it should really fit on a single line in 
the .conf.

> - the use of special character eg: dash (-), parentheses (), tilde
> (~), etc is allowed ?

In the Description field for a UTF-8 module, you are allowed to use any 
characters you need other than \n and \r.

> And how to avoid duplicated names with existing one ? is there any
> kind of registered name/registration body to avoid duplicate name ?

BTG considered at one time creating a registration authority for OSIS 
identifiers but has not done so.

Official Sword modules are always brought into conformity with our 
naming standards prior to release, but checking the existing 
repositories would be the only way to know prior to module submission 
whether an ID is already in use.

I have never heard of the module renaming facility that Eeli suggests, 
and it is not part of the Sword library itself. When InstallMgr 
discovers modules with the same ID in multiple repositories, it assumes 
they refer to the same module (though possibly different versions of 
it). By this facility, we publish one version via the public repository 
while publishing a beta version (with an incremented version number) 
from the beta repository. When testers download the beta version, it 
overwrites the publicly released version, which can only be regained by 
uninstalling and re-installing from the public repository.

--Chris