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AbiWord Weekly News #49, (2001, week 25, released 2001.06.23)
Welcome to issue 49 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
Still moving towards 0.9.0. Even though we didn't see as much action this week as I had hoped, there were fixed quite a few bugs, some features were polished, and Patrick Lam revealed he's brewing on endnotes which may just get ready in time for 1.0.
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2001.06.16 - 2001.06.22 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| hub | 52 | Patches from Andrew (importer and exporter fixes, proper fallback action on assertion failure, unicode clipboard support on NT), patch from John L. Clark for XHTML exporter. |
| msevior | 40 | Symbols/dingbat printing problems fixed, fixed bug in .abw saver, styles and numbering fixes, scroll speed improvements, crasher fixes. |
| dom | 36 | MSWord password work, styles work, doc updates, fix GNOME printing segv, filetype and text importer patches (from Andrew), iconv hacking (collaboration with Mike), XHTML exporter crasher fixed, soft hyphen support, IT and LT locale tweaks. |
| frodo | 13 | Autoconf hacking (some patches from Alec Wolman too), Psion example documents. |
| thomasf | 11 | QNX plugin dialog, build fixes for QNX 6.1. |
| phma | 10 | Nynorsk locale update from Karl. |
| jskov | 8 | AbiWord Weekly News and some HTML fixes. |
| cuenca | 6 | Extended perl bindings and added documentation. |
| tamlin | 1 | EditMethods corrections. |
| mpritchett | 1 | Dialog title correction. |
Patch of the week goes to the people that have been working on fixing problems filed by the documentation gang, XHTML exporter problems in particular.
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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.06.01 57 ( +3%) 91 ( +2%) 287 ( +0%) 2001.06.08 61 ( +7%) 101 ( +10%) 308 ( +7%) 2001.06.15 67 ( -1%) 136 ( +3%) 301 ( +0%) 2001.06.22 95 ( +41%) 144 ( +5%) 312 ( +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:
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 Microsoft Word Save As file type in future releases | ||
| 1276 | Table support | ||
| 1016 | PDF output would be nice | ||
| 1090 | czech menu not correct | ||
| 1182 | Cursor Disappears | ||
| 1408 | Automatic spellcheck splits words on accented characters (and specials, other languages, non ASCII symbols) | ||
| 1104 | AbiWord crashes when trying to load ms word file | ||
| 1427 | "Lock" styles | ||
| 1445 | Documents saved as .abw are sometimes flagged as bogus 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 | 195 |
| 0.9 | 70 |
| 1.0 | 71 |
| future | 76 |
Closed Bugs
Note that there are many many bugs just waiting for QA before they can be closed. Please help!
In the past week, the following 4 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified fixed):
On the Mailing List
Traffic on the developer mailing list is definitely going back up, this week reaching 250 postings.
You may also find interesting threads on the user and documentation lists (unfortunately the archive for the latter is broken at the moment).
This week, interesting topics on the developer list included:
HOWTO use the perl bindings: Joaqu�posted a HOWTO for using the perl bindings and received a lot of feedback.
Memory leaks: Andrew pointed out that AbiWord is leaking memory badly. Resulted in some nice traces from Mike.
Fwd: not worth downloading: We got a bad review it appears, but there's general consensus the guy didn't actually make a decent effort of using AbiWord. However, there were some valid points raised and I think people took some notes.
partial progress towards endnotes: Patrick Lam announced that he's been hacking on endnotes. That would be a quite nice feature to have for 1.0 and it may just happen.
profile results for new UT_* implementations?: Paul Rohr asked for profiling data for the new helper class implementations. There's some background information on implementation and reasons for the reimplementation in the thread.
Ispell hashes.: Martin asked for help building a repository of ispell dictionaries. Please make sure to send him one for your language if he doesn't already have it.
Towards Version 0.90: Martin posted an updated list of issues to be resolved before the 0.9.0 release.
UCS-2 vs. UCS-4: Mike asked if we should consider switching to a different internal character representation in AbiWord. Thats a valid concern seeing as Unicode already has more characters than can be represented with a 16 bit data type.