Developer Download

Developers can obtain the AbiWord source in a number of ways. (For binary installers, see the download area of the site.) You can get the source via tarballs or through anonymous SVN access. The tarballs will almost always be slightly out of date, and will only be created when we have something new and somewhat stable to show. SVN downloads and nightly builds will be the state of the tree as of the last checkin and are not guaranteed to be anything but very fresh.:-)

Release Numbers

We will follow the Linux release number system where odd minor release numbers indicate unstable development releases and even minor release numbers indicate stable milestone releases. So, for example, Release 1.0.x will be a stable release and Release 1.1.x will be what was built last night.

Tarball Downloads

The current release, as well as older versions, are available from the download page. These tarballs contain the AbiWord source code as well as other source code required by the AbiWord build process.

Anonymous SVN Access

We use SVN as our source code control system. We have set up anonymous access to a mirror of the source tree so you can checkout files over the Internet.

A gui SVN client for Microsoft Windows may be found at tigris.org, and another recommended client may be found in the MSYS DTK (Minimal gnu SYStem [a recommended way of building abiword] Developer ToolKit).

The tree we provide access to is a live copy of our production tree. If you want to make one time changes that make it into the production tree, send email to the abiword development development mailing list. Let us know if you want to be responsible for specific features and therefore will need access to the production tree.

To checkout a copy of the source using SVN:

  1. You can now check out AbiWord's sources. These are available in a SVN moduled called abiword: 
         $ svn co http://svn.abisource.com/abiword/trunk abiword
    This should produce a lot of output, telling you which files get checked out of the repository. The full list of modules in source control can be found @ http://svn.abisource.com/
  2. AbiWord relies on some helper libraries, including glib, libxml2, libpng, libgsf, zlib. It is recommended that you download them from their respective homepages and install according to their instructions. See abiword/docs/build.txt for better information on just what is needed from SVN and elsewhere.

SVN Access For Developers

If you have a SVN account and want to check out the source code, then use the following command:

     $ svn co svn+ssh://<account>@svn.abisource.com/svnroot/abiword/trunk abiword
     $ etc...

Nightly builds and nightly source tarballs

For those who want to be on the bleeding edge, here are some nightly (and/or every-other-nightly) build sites.

These builds may not work particularly well, but they usually do.