[sword-devel] Bibletime 2.0.alpha3 FTBFS with sword 1.6.0RC1 library

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

Thanks for the answers.

Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
>> And BTW, I have never understood the use of public data members in the 
>> library.
> 
> Yeah yeah, or the non-standard case of method names, etc.  It's a 20 
> year old library and has some history.  We have a milestone version in 
> jira for normalizing the public interface-- when we'll remove all public 
> data members.
> 

That sounds good!

> 
> You shouldn't have to use any public data member (that I'm aware of). 
> Some were exposed in the past to give access to things which probably 
> should be exposed.  The ones that should we should add getters.  Agreed.
> 
> You really shouldn't have had to read any code in the library for the 
> installmgr.  We developed a cmdline example which implements every 
> feature available at sword/utilities/installmgr.cpp
> 

I think we'll have to refactor our code, both for install manager and swmgr.

> And if you'd like commit access to improve the header comments, please 
> ask :)

I know I should do that as much as anybody. But there is a chicken/egg 
problem: the existing documentation is so scarce that I should read the 
source code for almost every function to reliably know what to write. 
And that exactly puts me down even before I start.

When coding with a library, most of the work is reading documentation. I 
think every frontend developer can confirm that. The documentation makes 
half of the library. The larger the library, the more important the 
documentation is. That's why I have complained about it every now and 
then. It's unfortunate that the Sword library has gradually grown so 
that the users (frontend developers) don't any more understand it and 
the documentation hasn't been updated to answer to the new requirements. 
I'll try to think if I can help somehow, and I hope others do that as well.

Thanks for your patience. I don't want to blame Troy or anyone else 
about this, even though this was a reaction to Troy's post.

--Eeli Kaikkonen