Development News

This week was fairly slow for AbiWord development, with only 8 new patches in the tree, by 6 different authors.

The most significant patch this week was from Thomas Briggs, who added Windows Word Count, fixed Insert Symbol on Windows, and allowed keyboard input to modeless dialogs on Windows. He followed this up with a one line fix for a minor bug discovered by Paul Egli. For his work on this, Thomas wins this week's Sourcegear Patch Prize. Congratulations.

Another big patch this week came from Sam, who implemented an alpha version of page numbering. Unfortunately, the display does not work properly yet, due to what seems to be a formatter problem that had previously been undiscovered. Later, he added some improvements to his code, but didn't fix any of the major bugs.

Finally, Bill Carpenter added another significant Smart Quotes improvement, which this time allowed the display, rather than just the recognition of these characters. Martin Vermeer improved Latin-1 character handling in L_AT^EX output. Anders Melchiorsen improved the look of the Find/Replace dialog. And Justin reduced unnecessary dialog display.

On The List

This week was also slow on the list, with only 73 messages posted to abiword-dev. Signifigant topics included:

1. Scripting - The various flamewars over scripting languages continued, mostly centered around the idea of using BASIC, which some people expressed hate for. However, people seem to have gotten back to doing useful things with their time, rather than flaming each other.

2. Win32 Word Count - Thomas offered his patch to the list for consideration, and it was both commented on and committed. Some of these comments led to improvements.

3. The Mac Port - In response to a question by Sam, Herbert said that he is "trying to" work on the Mac port "reguarly", but that there are some serious issues currently.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 198 bugs outstanding, with 20 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 5 bugs, 4 of which were fixes, and 6 new bugs were opened.

Other News

This week's cool post award goes to Bill Carpenter, for his two patch messages, both of which include detailed commentary.

June Summary

June was a busy month for AbiWord all around. This month saw:

- The release of AbiWord 0.7.10
- 722 messages on the list
- 119 patches to the tree
- The most prolific poster was Martin Sevior, followed by Aaron Lehmann and Sam TH
- Joaquin was interviewed by Linuxpower.org

Sam TH
sam@uchicago.edu