AbiWord Weekly News (11/15/2000)

Development News

This week, there was lots of development, as we prepared for release 0.7.12. There were 67 commits, from 20 different developers. This week, we also saw the addition of four new developers. Congratulations to Vadim, Belcon, Michl and Matt.

This week's largest patch was from Hubert, who updated a large number of Mac OS files. He hasn't provided a status report recently, but the Mac port is generating lots of code. The other very large patch this week was from Aaron, who got Libxml2 working again.

This week's most significant patch, however, was the large quantity of wv work that Dom committed this week. Included in this was lots of portability and bug fixing, along with export work, internationalization work, and Word 6 import. Wv continues to a component that AbiWord just couldn't live without.  

Additonally, lots of work this week went into preparing for for our next release, version 0.7.12.  Vlad and Sam spent lots of time on the list discussing several release critical bugs, leading to fixes for both of them from Vlad.  Dom fixed problems with iconv in wv that were causing crashes on several platforms.  Spelling on Windows was fixed, and further miscellaneous fixes were made.  

There were also lots of other development advances.  Matt Brubeck (new developer) and Mike Nordell added code cleanup, making AbiWord more robust.  Martin fixed a number of spell checiking an list bugs.  And Sam added the option of using the Standard Template Library vector as the backend in out internal vector class.  

Finally, there was lots of localization work.  Rui Silva, who along with Pierre Abbat now has CVS access to update the translations, helped get Ukranian (from new translator Vadim Frolov) into the tree.  There ware also updates to Indonesian, Portugese, Spanish and Norwegian.  

On The List

This week saw lots of activity on the list, with 401 messages posted to abiword-dev, a record for a single week.  Significant topics included

• CJK Work - Lots of dicussion continued on the list about import of CJK documents, mostly in the area of MS Word documents.  This led to a number of patches, and further support for these languages in wv.  
• Smartquotes problems - Several different smartquotes problems were discussed on the list, with Vlad providing a patch to fix them.  With some editing, this patch was then committed.  AbiWord's smart quotes feature should now be compatible with non-Latin language support.  
• Segfault with early glibc - Several people, including Pierre, reported segfaults immmediately upon starting AbiWord.  This problem was eventually tracked down to a particular iconv call, which was then limited with a patch from Vlad to CJK language support, making the problem invisible to the reporters. The actual problem was a bug in glibc, which is fixed in newer versions.  
• Lists bugs and fixes - Martin continued to fix bugs, and other people continued to discover them, prompting a steady stream of emails about one of our most complex, and most flexible features.  
• Libraries and segfaults - Matt Brubeck discovered a segfault in libpspell that was caused by a bug in AbiWord.  The bug was fixed, but Sam opined that he thought libpspell should try not to crash in this event.  Kevin Atkinson, Pspell author, and he went back and forth on this for a few emails, without coming to an agreement.  

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 256 bugs outstanding, with 52 of those still in SUBMIT state.

Other News

This week's cool patch award goes to Matt Brubeck, for fixing crashes before they happen - always the best time.  

Sam TH
sam@uchicago.edu