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AbiWord Weekly News #64, (2001, week 40, released 2001.10.09)
Welcome to issue 64 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
AbiWord 0.9.4 released - and I have it from a reliable inside source that there's been tons of good feedback. This is a good release: if you don't already have it, go download it.
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
| 2001.09.29 - 2001.10.05 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| cuenca | 45 | Perl bindings and dynamic menus work. |
| fjfranklin | 37 | ImageMagick and libwmf wv stuff, |
| matti | 26 | Win32 stuff: drag and drop, topruler work, fixed status line messages, MSV6 build fixes, and cursor resources. |
| msevior | 22 | Column dialog polish, fixed sized columns cursor movement fixes, context menu fixes, and new column dialog controls. |
| mpritchett | 10 | Win32 work: column dialog, localization (from Gilles) and installer update. |
| jskov | 9 | POW update and AWNs. |
| dom | 4 | AbiWord on unix can now load plugins on startup. |
| phma | 2 | Nynorsk update (from Karl Ove Hufthammer) |
| rms | 1 | PT locale update. |
| tomas_f | 1 | UTF8 locale fix. |
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 |
| 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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.09.14 127 ( +3%) 171 ( +17%) 349 ( +0%) 2001.09.21 134 ( +5%) 189 ( +10%) 346 ( +0%) 2001.09.28 143 ( +6%) 169 ( -10%) 345 ( +0%) 2001.10.05 145 ( +1%) 170 ( +0%) 352 ( +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:
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 | ||
| 376 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slurp | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey | ||
| 1406 | xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg | ||
| 1104 | AbiWord crashes when trying to load a particular MS Word file | ||
| 1545 | Help only works for localizations en-US es-ES fr-FR | ||
| 824 | Abiword does no recognize the dictionary |
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 | 288 |
| 0.9.x | 42 |
| 1.0 | 94 |
| future | 87 |
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 7 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified):
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:
Fwd: parsons: The web and CVS server was down for most of the weekend.
MadeWithAbiWord icon/label/banner: Martin Willemoes Hansen thinks patriot users should have an easy way of helping spread the good word about AbiWord. No followups though.
Abiword 0.9.4 released: Martin announced the new release. Release notes can be found here. The first Win32 binaries were flawed, but have been fixed.
commit: file drag-and-drop for win32: Matti Picus added DND for Windows.
Feature Freeze?: David Chart wondered about when we might see a feature freeze for 1.0 so he could get on with the on-line documentation. Martin listed a few features he'd like to see completed, but it all depends on how much time the developers have to spend on it. Martin called for comments on what dates to put in stone - no outcome of that though (yet).