Re: [be] How to sync with Paratext

[Dennis Drescher]

Hi Teus,

Let me make a couple comments here. I want to take the point of view of 
a new user. I mean no disrespect and like you, I only want to see things 
become more usable for everyone. I've been using Linux for five years 
now but I'm often amazed as to what people except as "normal". For example:

Teus Benschop wrote:
> In defence of the standard location being .bibledit, it can be brought
> forward that in Linux the "dot-applicationname" is very common. In a
> typical home directory one can find .ssh, .wine, .vmware,
> .thunderbird, .mozilla, .Skype, and so on, and so on.

Average new user speaking: "Where can I find these files with "dots" on 
the front of them? I open up Nautilus and I can't find a single file in 
my entire hard drive with a dot on the front of it. What's up with that?"

Can you see the problem here? I know that .filename is standard Linux 
but standard for who? Certainly not new or even semi-experienced users. 
That's the magic-under-the-hood-stuff that average users don't want to 
mess with.

I'm not against keeping them in .bibledit, especially if you can make 
them book files instead of chapter files. However, what you might 
consider doing is having a "public" location and provide a simple file 
finder dialog to the user to link the files out to the folder of their 
choosing. It would just be a simple behind-the-scene ln -s command for 
BE. That might be a way to make it seem more natural for newer users. 
Just an idea.

In Him,

Dennis




Teus Benschop wrote:
> Hi Gang,
>
> I am responding to calls to put the data in book files rather than in
> chapter files, and to allow the user to easily put the data where he or
> she wants.
>
> The last points is easier to answer than the first one, so let me start
> with the one about allowing the user to put the data where he wants.
>
> Normally Bibledit stores its data in ~/.bibledit. To move it elsewhere,
> move the ~/.bibledit directory to another directory, and than create a
> symbolic link from ~/.bibledit to that new directory. That is all.
>
> In defence of the standard location being .bibledit, it can be brought
> forward that in Linux the "dot-applicationname" is very common. In a
> typical home directory one can
> find .ssh, .wine, .vmware, .thunderbird, .mozilla, .Skype, and so on,
> and so on.
>
> The first point is to put the data in book files, so that, in
> combination with the free choice of the data location, collaboration
> with Paratext becomes simpler.
>
> Actually early version of Bibledit have the data stored in book form.
> And early version of Bibledit had an option to "Link" to Paratext files.
> But the linking to PT had a disadvantage, and that was that doing that
> was messy. Once the "real" collaboration system was introduced into
> Bibledit, first using subversion, later git, then the messy
> collaboration with Paratext by linking was troubling the system. If any
> collaboration with other editors are to take place, then it should now
> go through the collaboration engine, in this case git.
>
> Once collaboration came in, or even before that, it was found to improve
> the speed of the system when data was stored one chapter per file. This
> is because the editing happens per chapter too. So no extraction of that
> one chapter was needed, and no integration of an edited chapter into the
> bigger file was needed.
>
> Those that still want to collaborate with Paratext, there is a
> less-than-easy work-around. One can export all the books to USFM files,
> then import these into Paratext, then do the editing in Paratext, then
> re-import Paratext's files into Bibledit.
>
> Having said all the above though, I am willing to consider and implement
> anything that makes life easier for the users. Therefore if you need the
> things discussed above, pls. submit feature requests (now called
> "tasks") in order to have that done.
>
> Regards,
>
> Teus.
>
>
> X-Quarantine ID  /var/spool/MD-Quarantine/08/qdir-2008-12-22-08.36.21-003