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AbiWord Weekly News #56, (2001, week 32, released 2001.08.13)
Welcome to issue 56 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
This week AbiWord 0.9.1 was released, and we'll probably see a 0.9.2 early next week after some Windows build problems have been fixed.
No, 0.9.1 is not a brown paper bag release, but simply the result of the developers deciding to make very frequent releases in 0.9.x series until 1.0 is reached.
These 0.9.x releases, however, will not always be accompanied by binaries for all platforms. Of course, as more and more bugs get fixed during the 0.9.x cycle, we may see point-releases with accompanying binaries before 1.0.
Seeing as we're now in the 0.9.x cycle, I'd like to (yet again) ask people (users, developers, lurkers - the whole shebang) to go to the bug list in BugZilla and cast your votes for bugs you'd like to see fixed. The present list of priorities has not really changed for a long time (other than the bugs on it that have been nailed recently). This is your chance to voice your (personal) direction of the bug fixing effort! See below for details...
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2001.08.04 - 2001.08.10 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| dom | 66 | UI fixes, spelling and iconv updates, wv patch (from FJF), more UI improvements, exceptions support changes, removed stock clipart icons, wv resync, MS Word and WP importer fixes. |
| msevior | 42 | Many section break fixes. |
| hub | 25 | FreeBSD build fix (from obomax@FreeBSD.org), fixed some warnings, FreeBSD and Solaris autoconf fixes, libiconv sync, fixed GTK Tab Dialog, and Lithuanian menu labels (from Mantas Kriauciunas) |
| aiken | 24 | Aiksaurus work. |
| paul | 20 | libiconv makefile updates for old build system, fixed warnings, added credits. |
| dchart | 8 | Various help files and release note updates. |
| movement | 8 | Aiksaurus fixes. |
| phma | 3 | Italian string update (from Marco Innocenti). |
| rms | 3 | pt_PT updates. |
| jskov | 3 | AWN #55 |
| mpritchett | 1 | Fix MSVC compiler breakage. |
Patch of the week goes to Jared Davis for his thesaurus work.
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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.07.20 77 ( -10%) 87 ( -37%) 321 ( +3%) 2001.07.27 68 ( -11%) 108 ( +24%) 318 ( +0%) 2001.08.03 87 ( +27%) 118 ( +9%) 316 ( +0%) 2001.08.10 107 ( +22%) 133 ( +12%) 311 ( -1%)
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 |
| 1276 | Table support | ||
| 1030 | Font substitution table | ||
| 1410 | Please add .doc Microsoft Word Save As file type in future releases | ||
| 1016 | PDF output would be nice | ||
| 1545 | Help only works for localizations en-US es-ES fr-FR | ||
| 376 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slurp | ||
| 1505 | It would be nice if the menu strings were dynamically loadable | ||
| 1046 | Some localized strings truncated in Windows version | ||
| 1104 | AbiWord crashes when trying to load a particular MS Word file | ||
| 1360 | custom pagesizes can't be entered |
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 | 185 |
| 0.9.x | 51 |
| 1.0 | 98 |
| future | 83 |
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 2 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified fixed):
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:
Ideas for 'Marketing' Abiword: Jared Davis posted a list of suggestions for how to best increase the number of AbiWord users.
Release Tomorrow: Dom called for a 0.9.1 release on Thursday, and Hubert followed up with the actual announcement.
AbiWord Interface Review: Jared Davis had another very interesting posting this week: an informal review of the existing AbiWord user interface, with suggestions for improvement. This resulted in a long thread and some immediate changes to the AbiWord user interface.