Development News

This week we had 13 new patches checked into the tree, from 7 different authors. Congratulations to Anders and Bill, our newest contributors.

The most significant patch this week was from Michael Pritchett, who added a separate Insert Picture dialog, in addition to fixing bug 296. For his contributions this week, Michael wins the $299 patch prize awarded by Sourcegear. Congratulations, Michael.

This week's other big patch was from new contributor Bill Carpenter, who fixed a number of problems with our handling of Microsoft Word Smart Quotes. This makes conversion from MS Word even easier that it already was.

Finally, Mike Meyer's PFA/PFB font handling code was committed this week. Other important checkins this week included Aaron's fixes for bugs 878 and 879, and portability fixes from Hubert. Thomas also made a number of improvements to the QNX port.

On The List

This week continued a busy month, with 88 messages on the list. Significant topics included:

1. Scripting - Aaron started quite a discussion with a proposal for scripting using a Scheme-based engine called Guile. However, this soon led into consideration of everything from CORBA to VB. This took up most of the list traffic for the week.

2. What is AbiWord? - The GNU project asked what AbiWord was like, and we corrected them in a few places.

3. Internals Questions - Jesper brought up a number of suggestions for back-end improvements, which were then discussed to some degree.

4. Sizing of GTK Dialogs - Anders Melchiorsen suggested a way we could improve sizing, and after some discussion, it was committed.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 196 bugs outstanding, with 16 of those still in SUBMIT state. Since last week, the bug total has increased by 5, with 6 new bugs filed.

Other News

This week, Joaquin Abela was interviewed by LinuxPower.org. Everyone should check out his interesting ideas on AbiWord.

This week's cool post award goes to Jesper, for his complex and highly detailed analysis of several important problems.

Everyone interested in in AbiWord development is encouraged to join #abiword-dev on EFNet IRC Network.

Sam TH
sytobinh@uchicago.edu