AbiWord Weekly News (5/25/2000)

"Fortunately, the second-to-last bug has just been fixed." - Ray Simard

Development News

This week saw lots of development, with 30 new patches in the tree, including several significant ones! We also added four new contributors. Congratulations to Jesus, Jesper, Dixie and Petr.

The most significant checkin this week was from Martin, who committed his extensive work on modeless dialogs. Additionally, he made his Insert Symbol dialog modeless. His framework does not just provide for modelessness, but also for proper dialog switching when the focus switches. This checkin became the focus of significant development effort for the rest of the week, as Bruce made the Win32 Insert Symbol modeless, and Joaquin, Martin and Bruce all improved the XP framework for modeless dialogs. Joaquin also created a GNOME version of Insert Symbol.

For his significant contributions this week, especially in the area of cross-platform compatibility, which included porting the modeless Insert Symbol and finding and fixing significant and subtle bugs in the modeless dialog framework, Bruce Pearson wins this week's Patch Prize. Congratulations, Bruce. Enjoy the $299.

Joaquin also checked in several other improvements, including significant improvements to Insert Field, the beginnings of a Spanish translation of the help files, and several improvement to the L^AT_EX exporter.

Other significant checkins included the Show Paragraph feature from Alexey, which nearly squashes an extremely old POW. Alexey also fixed a few other bugs. Sam added a tar.bz2 distribution format, Bruce fixed bug 431, and Jesper Skov updated some of the developer documentation. Finally, Dixie Thornhill made significant updates to the English help files.

On The List

This week saw a large volume of mail on the abiword-dev, with 160 messages posted to the list. Some of the significant topics were:

Page Break Bugs - Several problems, leading to asserts and crashes, were identified in the page break code. Significant effort was expended by Jesper, Mike and Sam in order to track them down, but no definite solution was reached.
Modeless Dialogs - Many different threads discussed problems and solutions for the modeless dialog framework, and specific implementations. Lots of progress was made, as was reflected by the number of checkins.
Cygwin Problems and Solutions - This week, progress was made toward building AbiWord on Win32 without MS Visual C++. Also, crashes in the Cygwin enviroment were analyzed
L^AT_EX Export - Joaquin wondered aloud whether the exporter should preserve the AbiWord margins. Opinions were solicited, and the end result was to keep the AbiWord margins.
Cursor Class - After getting some help with a technical question, Mike posted a preliminary patch to add the cursor as its own class.
Windows Scrap - A user suggested that we support the Windows scrap format, which led to discussion of both the requirments of this, and whether is was cross-platform.
XHMTL Import - Sam posted a patch to add support for importing XHTML documents, which sparked some discussion about its feasability and features.
Top Ruler - Alexey provided a patch to fix a bug in the top ruler, which engendered some discussion.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 214 bugs outstanding, with 14 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 19 bugs, 11 of which were fixes, and 7 new bugs were opened.

Other News

This week's cool patch award goes to Jesper Skov, for his extensive analysis of current problems in some parts of the formatter.

Sam TH
sytobinh@uchicago.edu