AbiWord Weekly News (8/02/2000)

Development News

This week, we had 36 patches checked into the tree, from 13 different developers. This week, we had 3 new developers added to the CREDITS file. Congratulations to Owen and Goran, and belated congratulations to Dom.

This week's biggest series of patches came from Dom Lachowicz, who implemented almost all of the functions needed for binary Word export. While the export is not fully functional yet, and only enabled in debugging builds, great progress has been made, and we hope to see this feature complete in 1.0. This also ZAPs the binary Word exporter POW.

This week's other big series of patches came for Goran Thyni, whose patch to enable libxml support was committed. This had adverse consequences for some of our build enviroments, which necessitated several patches. Joaquin also committed some changes to reduce the complexity and size of the changes.

The third large patch this week was from Christopher Plymire, who implemented about 10 different dialogs on Be.

Other significant developments included:

Gnome-print dialog from Dom

• List dialog on QNX, Win32
• Background check work from Bill Carpenter
• Other bug fixes

On The List

This week saw 199 messages on posted on abiword-dev, however, traffic on abiword-user dropped significnatly. Significant topics this week included

1. Build Breakage - Several people posted comments about the frequency of build breaks, and others noted that Tinderbox seemed to show not much successful compilation. In response, Sam analyzed current breakage on Tinderbox, and Thomas Fletcher posted suggestions for keeping everything building cleanly.
2. PostScript Symbols - Bill Carpenter noted several problems with printing symbols on Unix, and posted a patch to fix some of them. More problems remain unfixed.
3. PSpell - Kevin Atkinson, PSpell and ASpell developer, wondered if we were planning on using PSpell. Aaron replied that he would like to, but said that it might be a while before the code was written.
4. Autoconf - Goran posted a patch to add autoconf support. This propted several people to suggest improvements, but others were cautious about committing it until its cross-platform status was tested.
5. Tabs - Martin complained that tabs crashed his current CVS AbiWord. No one else could duplicate the problem, so Bill suggested that he get a new keyboard. :-)

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 204 bugs outstanding, with 20 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 1 bug, and 5 new bugs were opened.

Other News

This week's cool post award goes to Joaquin for his informative post on how to implement the new toolbar arrangement.

Sam TH
sam@uchicago.edu