AbiWord Weekly News (4/26/2000)

Here we go again . . .

Development News

Well, the big news in development is that the tree is currently closed for the imminent release of version 0.7.9. However, this week there have still been 19 patches added to the tree. This week, we gained one new contributor. Congratulations, Perry.

The biggest patch for this week was from our newest contributor, Perry Ismangil, who coaxed the AbiHello application to compile and run. He also plans to continue to improve AbiHello.

Bryan Prusha, back from an extended vacation from AbiWord, added several patches to get the Mac version to compile. We all look forward to our 5th OS coming on-line. Another significant patch comes from Henrik, who improved the Options and Insert Symbol dialogs in Win32, and updated the Swedish translation. Other significant changes came from Shaw (welcome back), who improved RPM support on Linux.

Finally, both Martin and Sam took advantage of their new CVS commit access to add a few patches. Sam fixed bug 811, and increased the default font size, while Martin fixed Insert Date and Time on Unix.

On The List

As we prepare for 0.7.9, several interesting discussions broke out on the list, which saw 74 posts this week. Significant topics this week included:

0.9.0 - Sam posted a list of features for 0.9/1.0, which naturally engendered much discussion. Topics ranged from time tables to bugs to documentation.
Default Font - Sam asked if people supported changing the default to 12 point, and most people did.
Mac Port - Bryan Prusha asked a few questions, and then got the Mac port compiling again.
Outlining - Randy Kramer asked about the possibility of collapsible outlining, and volunteered to do the coding. This led into a discussion on the proper structure of fields, and their XML representation.
EditMethod structure - Jeff and Sam discussed what the proper return value for EditMethods would be.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 195 bugs outstanding, with 15 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 8 bugs, and 6 new bugs were opened. We'll be down to zarro in no time flat. :-) Keep those quality bug reports coming in.

Other News

This week's cool patch award goes to Perry Ismangil, for resurrecting the AbiHello project.

This week's cool post award goes to James Ritchie, for his constructive suggestions on the future of AbiWord from a user's point of view.

This week, Sam announced that he was hosting nightly builds of AbiWord for Linux/i386 at http://sam.rh.uchicago.edu/abiword/nightly/

Sam TH
sytobinh@uchicago.edu