AbiWord Weekly News #43, (2001, week 19, released 2001.05.27)

Welcome to issue 43 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

Please note that this issue is describing action that happened a few weeks back. I've been sick and have decided to do AbiWord Weekly News for the weeks I was away - so it'll probably take some weeks for me to get back in sync.

This week was pretty slow, both development wise and as for traffic on the developer mailing list. Fortunately there's been a lot of traffic on the new documentation mailing list to make up for this.

In this issue:

• CVS Stats
• Project of the Week
• Bug Update
• On the Mailing List

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

Patch of the week is shared between Dom for the plugin manager and Joaquin (cuenca) for his dynamic menus.

Project Of the Week

POW (Project Of the Week) and the new uPOW (User Project Of the Week) is an attempt at attracting new developers and entice help from users by lowering the bar of entry to doing something constructive for AbiWord. A POW will describe a goal and often outline how to get there.

Presently we have a few unclaimed POWs. Please see the POW status page for more details.

Bug Update

Here's the AbiWord bug update for the last week. If you can spare some time, please help us triage the bugs - you don't need to be able to program to do this.

Bug Counts

These are the bug counts for the past 4 weeks:

Date:        Submitted:    QA:           Open:
----------------------------------------------------
2001.04.20   11 ( -35%)     57 ( -62%)   232 (  -3%)
2001.04.27   23 (+109%)     58 (  +1%)   228 (  -1%)
2001.05.04   28 ( +21%)     49 ( -15%)   293 ( +28%)
2001.05.11   48 ( +71%)     51 (  +4%)   295 (  +0%)

Bug Votes

As a user of AbiWord, you are able to vote on bugs you'd like to see closed. The process is quite simple:

1. Create yourself an account if you don't already have one.

2. Bring up the bug list.

3. Click on Bug IDs to read bug details.

4. If you find an interesting bug you'd like to have fixed, cast your vote by clicking on the "Vote for this bug" link on the bug description page.

You have 30 voting points you can cast in whatever proportions you'd like on anything between 1 and 30 bugs. But note that developers will likely prioritize a bug with 30 single votes than a bug with a single 30-unit vote. So vote with lower unit counts (5 or so) to make your voice heard!

From the sorted list of votes, we found the current Top 10 Bugs to be:

Target Milestones

We have just started nominating bugs for the next two big releases. You (as a user or developer) can have your say on which bugs to nominate by casting your vote on bugs as described above. The current milestone distribution is as follows:

Closed Bugs

In the past week, the following 2 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified fixed):

1232 and 1259

On the Mailing List

Traffic on the developer mailing list has been slow this week. Presumably hinting at the fact that many of the developers are students and are busy preparing for exams. Hopefully traffic, and development, will pick up again in the summer break. This week, interesting topics included:

1. SVG and compound images: F. J. Franklin started a small thread on SVG support, presumably born out of the clipart discussions of last week.
2. Irregularities in strings : Pierre Abbat has been (and is) on a quest to make sure all translated strings are sensible. He's found some interesting irregularities.
3. Commit: Better DND Handling: Dom improved the DND support in GNOME.
4. GIFs: Aaron Lehmann suggested removing GIF format images from the help files, due to technical and legal issues. There followed various discussion on both the legality of software patents and the best ways to compress PNG images.