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AbiWord Weekly News #48, (2001, week 24, released 2001.06.17)
Welcome to issue 48 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
This week development picked up again and 35 fixed bugs are pending QA. Seems people are really intending on making this upcoming release (0.9.0) a good one. Dom posted a TODO list and I suspect we'll see a lot of stuff on it fixed next week.
Also, the abiword-docs gang are getting top quality feedback and bugs they file have a short life expectancy. As it should be, too :) They are producing good stuff, and I hope we'll be able to make it available in the not too distant future. Maybe a first release for 0.9.0?
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2001.06.09 - 2001.06.15 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| dom | 96 | Exporter fixes (in collaboration with Andrew), GNOME toolbar fixes, Text importer (from Andrew), splash screen preference, hash map fixes (from Mike), spell checking based on document locale, RTF export fixes, many ispell changes, and preliminary support for password protected Word documents. |
| msevior | 43 | Various crasher fixes, pixel dirt cleanups, and background repainting architecture. |
| hub | 39 | Windows fixes (from Andrew), RPM package fix, hash map fixes, ispell changes (some from Karl Ove Hufthammer), English locales, RTF export fix, various other fixes from Andrew (encoding manager, localization, UCS2 detection), RTF importer fixes and support for importing headers/footers. |
| frodo | 31 | Many autoconfig/make fixes. |
| jskov | 13 | Weekly News #47 and some fixes to older issues. |
| thomasf | 11 | Const warnings/errors and Encoding dialog for QNX. |
| tomas_f | 7 | ttftool improvements. |
| phma | 1 | Italian updates from Marco Innocenti. |
| rms | 1 | Compile fix. |
Patch of the week goes to three people because I can't decide which set of patches I like best: Martin has made some good work on the background painting architecture which has really improved performance and finish. Dom bit the bullet and improved the ispell support; even though we all hate it, it's still the only spell checker available on Windows. Finally, Frodo Looijaard finished off the work Sam started on the autoconf/make system - I guess (and hope!) this should make it possible for all to use.
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.
| Type | POW | Summary |
| POW | 2001.22 | Sorting contents of combo boxes and splash screen preference option |
| POW | 2001.18 | ImageMagick multipurpose graphic importer |
| uPOW | 2001.17 | Where to send AbiWord announcements |
| uPOW | 2001.09 | Determining Locale Status |
| POW | 2001.09 | Speed up bulk spell checking |
| uPOW | 2001.07 | Host for AbiWord BugDay |
| uPOW | 2001.06 | Update Feature and UI matrices |
| POW | 2001.05 | Bug-buddy support for AbiWord |
| POW | 1999.47 | Make translated dialogs fit |
| uPOW | 1999.37 | CS folks wanted... |
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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.05.25 55 ( +10%) 89 ( +53%) 287 ( -6%) 2001.06.01 57 ( +3%) 91 ( +2%) 287 ( +0%) 2001.06.08 61 ( +7%) 101 ( +10%) 308 ( +7%) 2001.06.15 67 ( -1%) 136 ( +3%) 301 ( +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:
Create yourself an account if you don't already have one.
Bring up the bug list.
Click on Bug IDs to read bug details.
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:
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1030 | Font substitution table | ||
| 1410 | Please add .doc Save As file type in future releases | ||
| 1276 | Table support | ||
| 1016 | PDF output would be nice | ||
| 1182 | Cursor Disappears | ||
| 1104 | AbiWord crashes when trying to load MS Word file | ||
| 1427 | "Lock" styles | ||
| 1445 | Documents saved as .abw are sometimes flagged as bogus document | ||
| 1046 | Some localized strings truncated in Windows version | ||
| 1333 | Inserting a word is O(n) in the number of words in the document. |
Target Milestones
We have just started nominating bugs for the next two big releases. You, developer and user, 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:
| Milestone | Bug count |
| Without Nomination | 162 |
| 0.9 | 66 |
| 1.0 | 71 |
| future | 75 |
Closed Bugs
In the past week, the following 15 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified fixed):
461, 513, 744, 1345, 1401, 1444, 1456, 1476, 1488, 1491, 1504, 1517, 1520, 1523 and 1555
On the Mailing List
Traffic on the developer mailing list has picked up a little this week compared to the two previous weeks.
This week, interesting topics included:
Abiword used as Word replacement: We all felt pretty good about this article. Hopefully the students at Trinity College will help us make AbiWord better, either by contributing code and fixes, or by making sure bugs are filed on problems they find. Like all the rest of our users (and lurkers) do, right? Right? :)
Status of autoconf framework: Frodo was pretty active most of the week, improving the autoconf/make framework piece by piece. Very nice!
Ispell: Dom fixed ispell support. And there was much rejoicing (among Windows users anyway).
TODO Before the release: Dom posted a list of stuff that needs to be done before the 0.9.0 release. Resulted in quite a thread.