AbiWord Weekly News #58, (2001, week 34, released 2001.09.25)
Welcome to issue 58 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
AbiWord Weekly News is back after a (somewhat longer than anticipated) break. I'll work my way through the archives from weeks past so we don't miss any goodies.
Starting with this issue, I've decided to remove the Patch Of The Week "award" - not because it's not a good idea, but because it's hard to select who should get it. So there.
Note that Top 10 Bugs and Milestone Bugs are from 2001.09.25, not week 34.
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
| 2001.08.18 - 2001.08.24 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| dom | 48 | Bugfix in unixframe code, KWord importer improvements, MSWord Doc importer improvements, several iconv fixes, automake fixes, segv bug fixed, adope font fix, saveAs buglet fixed, wv patches from FJF, exception handling tweaks, and Czec wv fix. |
| hub | 38 | Unixstring fix, User FAQ updates, clean up mac files (with Ben Fowler), QD support (from Ben Fowler), file path fix for xhtml export (from John), fix GNOME config detection, and BeOS changes (from Stephane Fritsch). |
| aiken | 29 | Thesaurus work. |
| tomas_f | 22 | Font script fix, BiDI fixes, and EndNote fixes. |
| msevior | 11 | RTF importer fix, fixed half-char-rubbed-out-bug, AbiWord exporter fix (from John), RTF importer list support, and some screenshots for other developers. |
| rms | 5 | Update Portuguese locale, Slovak localization (from Martin Lacko), and updated nynorsk labels (from ?). |
| jskov | 4 | Weekly News #57 |
| plam | 4 | rand() implementations and fix for bug 948. |
| dchart | 2 | 0.9.3 release notes. |
| mpritchett | 2 | BiDi support added to Column Dialog. |
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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.08.03 87 ( +27%) 118 ( +9%) 316 ( +0%) 2001.08.10 107 ( +22%) 133 ( +12%) 311 ( -1%) 2001.08.17 112 ( +4%) 119 ( -10%) 329 ( +5%) 2001.08.24 94 ( -16%) 125 ( +5%) 363 ( +10%)
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 | ||
| 1410 | Please add .doc Microsoft Word Save As file type in future releases | ||
| 1030 | Font substitution table | ||
| 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 | ||
| 1243 | undo after a paste command causes crash | ||
| 1418 | File/Page Setup box hangs on using OK to exit | ||
| 1505 | It would be nice if the menu strings were dynamically loadable | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey |
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 | 261 |
| 0.9.x | 41 |
| 1.0 | 94 |
| future | 85 |
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 17 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified fixed):
717, 964, 1128, 1208, 1566, 1744, 1763, 1776, 1820, 1831, 1848, 1870, 1877, 1880, 1882, 1886, 1889,
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:
FAQ -- good XP development practices: Over a few postings, Paul summarized some good practices for use in AbiWord development: the donut rule, taking the code guidelines seriously, adding an XP dependency on a peer library, upgrading peer libraries, credit where credit is due, and keep screen shots current.
[RELEASE] 0.9.3 schedule ?: Hub asked if 0.9.3 would happen soon, but Paul pointed out that last week there'd been a long discussion of the release process resulting in a lot of issues that have still not been addressed. So no release in the immediate future. More on the release process in the weeks to come...