AbiWord Weekly News #44, (2001, week 20, released 2001.05.27)

Welcome to issue 44 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

Again a belated issue of AbiWord Weekly News due to illness. I'm getting closer to sync though...

This week's issue (and last week's, actually) fix some inconsistencies in the CVS commit counts (now spans 7 days instead of 8), and also now counts files affected by checkins rather than number of functional changes. This makes it possible to automate the counting - oh, and bloats the numbers to make us look like busy beavers :)

Look below for what happened this week - I only want to emphasize one thing here: the German on-line help was greatly updated by Ralf Müller who also got patch of the week for that feat (yes, really, and it didn't even involve any programming! :) I'm really pleased to see the documentation side of AbiWord getting some attention now - after all, it's a tool used for writing, so it would be weird if we couldn't find writers to help us on that front.

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 goes to Ralf Müller for an amazing chunk of work to provide docs in German. Goes to show that good patches don't necessarily have to involve code!

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:
----------------------------------------------------
2001.04.27   23 (+109%)     58 (  +1%)   228 (  -1%)
2001.05.04   28 ( +21%)     49 ( -15%)   293 ( +28%)
2001.05.11   48 ( +71%)     51 (  +4%)   295 (  +0%)
2001.05.18   50 (  +4%)     58 ( +13%)   306 (  +3%)

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):

1414 and 1435

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. commit/HALF ZAP: Fix ispell stuff: Thomas Fletcher took a stab at cleaning up the ispell support code. All the developers hate the ispell code and wish it could be flushed from the tree, but it's unfortunately not possible until someone helps get pspell and aspell working on all of our supported platforms.
2. Styles again: Martin keeps pushing the issue of styles, and this thread contains some good stuff: both desired behavior and some insight into the design of properties support in the existing backend.
3. Status matrices: Sam made it possible to autogenerate the status matrices on the web pages from XML sources in the code tree. This caused QNX and Mac OS X entries to be updated swiftly.
4. Unicode UCS-2 importer: Andrew Dunbar proposed extending the previous Unicode (UTF-8) importer to handle UCS-2 formatted documents as well. UTF-8 is the de-facto standard on Unix, and UCS-2 is more common on Windows. It took a few iterations before everybody was happy, but it's in the tree now.
5. bar tab: Making the over/underline tables was a bit tedious due to some missing UI details. This was addressed pretty quickly by rms (no, not The RMS :) with some help from Paul and Martin.
6. Commit: more Applix import: This was the second of two commits from Hubert, adding an Applix importer.
7. Commit: MsWord Bidi support: Dom improved the MS Word importer to also deal with Bidirectional text (eg, Hebrew or Arabic).