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AbiWord Weekly News #68, (2001, week 44, released 2001.11.06)
Welcome to issue 68 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
This week we got Win32 dialogs for the features added last week and menu strings were moved into files loaded at runtime (for an even slimmer executable). We also gained another feature, namely "normal mode", and finally I'd like to emphasize on our (desperate!) search for someone to host a weekly BugDay on IRC.
Starting with this week's issue, I'll be posting bug counts from the day the other bug details are collected. That means a long list of closed bugs will be more visible in the statistics.
I've also decided to track the votes on bugs and feature requests separately in the future. Hopefully we'll see the bugs Top 10 change a lot more than what we've seen in the past. The feature requests Top 10 is likely to change at the same old slow pace though.
Finally, the last bugs nominated for 0.9.x have been moved to 1.0, and a new 1.2 category has been added. Don't forget to cast your votes on those bugs, people!
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2001.10.27 - 2001.11.02 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| dom | 64 | Fixed a lot of Bugs, libole2 improvements, normal-mode work, fake MS Word exporter, and hyperlink improvements. |
| aiken | 60 | Web site changes and aiksaurus work. |
| mpritchett | 50 | Menu strings moved to files loaded at runtime, Win32 no-dictionary-message, and Win32 bookmark+hyperlink+goto dialogs updated. |
| tomas_f | 41 | Bookmark and fields changes, BiDi fixes, hyperlinks work, and menu label code changes. |
| jskov | 39 | AWN#66 and #67. AWN XML updated and moved according to web site overhaul. |
| hub | 22 | Mac work, mac makefile fix (from F J Franklin) and fix bug 2118. |
| sam | 16 | Web site updates and a normal mode gfx bug fix. |
| msevior | 15 | Finished "normal mode" and fixed dynamic menus on GNOME. |
| matti | 10 | MSVC build files fixes, and a compiler warning fix. |
| rms | 8 | Portuguese locale updated, makefile changes, and a debug build fix. |
| dchart | 6 | Changelog updated, documentation for new features. |
| fjfranklin | 2 | wv version number bumped. |
| phma | 2 | Hungarian update (from Tamas Decsi) |
| aaronl | 1 | Fix build of RTF exporter. |
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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.10.16 149 ( +0%) 181 ( +5%) 360 ( +0%) 2001.10.23 149 ( +0%) 189 ( +4%) 352 ( -2%) 2001.10.30 164 ( +10%) 185 ( -2%) 352 ( +0%) 2001.11.06 155 ( -5%) 186 ( +0%) 331 ( -5%)
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 | ||
| 2069 | this doc crashes abiwin32 | ||
| 376 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slurp | ||
| 1360 | custom pagesizes can't be entered | ||
| 1271 | Postscript print formatting incorrect and inconsistent | ||
| 1406 | xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg | ||
| 1876 | some MS Word documents without password are treated as passw | ||
| 1402 | Can not use other than original type1 fonts | ||
| 1104 | AbiWord crashes when trying to load MS Word file | ||
| 1545 | Help only works for localizations en-US es-ES fr-FR |
And the Top 10 Requests For Enhancements to be:
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1276 | Table support | ||
| 1410 | Please add .doc Microsoft Word Save As file type in future releases | ||
| 1016 | PDF output would be nice | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey | ||
| 818 | ability to change default font | ||
| 1261 | Need to support footnotes | ||
| 1929 | Hyphenation is missing in Abiword | ||
| 1875 | Import of StarOffice Writer documents (*.sdw) | ||
| 1427 | "Lock" styles - disable all formatting commands except throu | ||
| 1292 | import jpeg images |
Target Milestones
We are nominating bugs for the next two big releases. Users as well as developers, can have their say on which bugs to nominate by casting votes on bugs as described above. The current milestone distribution is as follows:
| Milestone | Bug count |
| Without Nomination | 289 |
| 1.0 | 129 |
| 1.2 | 3 |
| future | 75 |
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 18 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified):
966, 1143, 1392, 1494, 1637, 1674, 1756, 1800, 1809, 1910, 2067, 2071, 2074, 2109, 2110, 2120, 2138, 2152,
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:
Attention translators...: Rui Miguel Seabra has updated dumpstrings.pl and wanted to make sure translators had noticed.
commit: Win32 update: Michael D. Pritchett checked in Win32 versions of the new dialogs added last week.
LXR Maintainer?: Jared Davis could use some help with LXR on the AbiWord development server.
commit: True 'Normal Mode': Martin added "normal mode" a la MS Word. This resulted in several threads on how "normal mode" is supposed to work.
commit: Menu Strings stored in .strings: Michael D. Pritchett moved menu strings into files loaded at runtime. This makes the executable smaller. Very nice.
RFC: keywords in bugzilla: Hubert Figuiere would like to see us using more keywords in BugZilla. He included a list of potential keywords and is going to add some of them to existing bugs.
Big source files: I happen to dislike source files with 6000+ lines in them (actually, I also dislike files with a lot less lines), and asked what could be done about it. Nothing, judging from the feedback. I guess I'm the only one seeing the problem.
Commit: bugz: Dom pointed out the obvious: there are too many bugs in BugZilla. He, Hub, and David Chart have been trying to clean it up a little the last days. What it comes down to is that we badly need someone to help get the triaging process work more smoothly - someone to host a weekly BugDay. Volunteers please come see us at #abiword on irc.gnome.org for a chat.