AbiWord Weekly News #51, (2001, week 27, released 2001.07.07)

Welcome to issue 51 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

Many bugs fixed (or closed as invalid) this week, among the most important to GNOME users would be WYSIWYG printing.

In this issue:

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

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

No CVS commit summary this week since Bonsai has been disabled due to CVS lag problems.

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:
----------------------------------------------------
2001.06.15   67 (  -1%)    136 (  +3%)   301 (  +0%)
2001.06.22   95 ( +41%)    144 (  +5%)   312 (  +3%)
2001.06.29   96 (  +1%)    165 ( +14%)   311 (  +0%)
2001.07.06   80 ( -16%)    167 (  +1%)   303 (  -2%)

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, 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:

Closed Bugs

In the past week, the following 30 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified fixed):

119, 167, 863, 892, 912, 914, 921, 963, 967, 993, 1015, 1040, 1044, 1056, 1082, 1087, 1339, 1371, 1512, 1554, 1556, 1557, 1558, 1571, 1572, 1581, 1585, 1617, 1633 and 1644

On the Mailing List

Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled on about 200 postings per week.

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:

1. Abiword in the News: Jared Davis made us aware of an AbiWord review. A good one too! It was also posted on gnotices and I think we all like to see all the talkback that follow such reviews: we need the user feedback, and unfortunately few users post such feedback directly to the mailing lists (or BugZilla).

2. Commit: WYSISWYG printing for gnome-print: Martin fixed GNOME printing.

3. Commit: Numbered Heading For Abi: Martin also gave us numbered headings (as requested in one of the talkbacks mentioned above, incidently).

4. Can't commit, no space on device: Again the server hosting AbiWord development ran out of space. I really hope SourceGear sorts this out - development should not be hindered by something as silly as missing disk space. The lack of disk space also caused BugZilla to drop data but fortunately Sam has been keeping backups, so it should be sorted out. Finally, other CVS problems also led to Bonsai getting disabled which is the reason for this weeks commits not being summarized.

5. installer suggestions: Alan Horkan suggested replacing the custom AbiWord Windows installer for a generic free installer. No followups, unfortunately, but I suspect that's because most of us are Unix heads. To me it sounds like a great idea - especially if Alan is willing to maintain it :)

6. Copyright of Modified Ispell Code: The copyright license of the ispell code was discussed - and resulted in Geoff Kuenning (ispell maintainer) promising to change the license.

7. patch -- cache last searched frag: Joaquin made another backend optimization. Nice.