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AbiWord Weekly News #70, (2001, week 46, released 2001.11.20)
Welcome to issue 70 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
Much activity this week with a lot of bugs closed. We also got a few new features (ImageMagick gfx import probably being the biggest). The first 0.9.5 prerelease is scheduled for branching within the next day or so. We need users to help us out by triaging bugs (it's not hard, really, and you'd do the developers a big favor) - see below in the bug section for details.
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2001.11.10 - 2001.11.16 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| dom | 82 | Made Win32 icons larger, format image dialog, better selection handling for plugins, image context menu, HTML export fix, iconv fix, wv cleanup, wv segv fixes (from Will Newton), fix mem leak (from Chris Chamberlin), fix toolbar inconsistency, new icons from GTK/GNOME 2, jpeg fixes, fix T602 build problem, fix plugin unload, version updates, fix bugs 2200 and 2201, layout mode tweaks, setenv fallback for putenv, and gfx importer tidies. |
| jskov | 61 | A few more squiggles fixes, squiggles debugging helpers, added cvsup instructions for developers, AWN #69, POW page updates, and made old AWNs point to the new POW page. |
| tomas_f | 60 | True Type Fonts documentation and code updates, font path work, BiDi fixes, fixed bug 1814, style and list related changes, toggleCase work, and isspace fix. |
| msevior | 32 | GDict make fix, dynamic toolbars work, dynamic labels. |
| rms | 31 | TB localization update, Swedish updates (Per Larsson), PT updates, fix compiler warning, makefile changes, fontmanager fix, dumpstrings fix, nn-NO updates (from Karl Trygve Kalleberg). |
| hub | 15 | Import images with RTF, Mac toolbars work, Mac OSX build fix, make HPUX use putenv. |
| mpritchett | 10 | Win32 build fixes, tinderbox build fix, Win32 mods for AbiMagick, plugin Win32 make system, and Win32 instructions for building ImageMagick. |
| fjfranklin | 10 | autoconf/make fixes, setenv() config check, and Darwin build guidelines. |
| phma | 3 | nn-NO updates (from Karl Trygve Kalleberg) and French update (from Gilles Saint-Denis). |
| dchart | 1 | ChangeLog updated |
| sam | 1 | Fix web typo. |
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 |
| 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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.10.30 164 ( +10%) 185 ( -2%) 352 ( +0%) 2001.11.06 155 ( -5%) 186 ( +0%) 331 ( -5%) 2001.11.13 164 ( +5%) 176 ( -5%) 329 ( +0%) 2001.11.20 176 ( +7%) 168 ( -4%) 327 ( +0%)
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 | ||
| 1261 | Need to support footnotes | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey | ||
| 1487 | Implementation of font "encoding" | ||
| 1929 | Hyphenation is missing in Abiword | ||
| 1427 | "Lock" styles - disable all formatting commands except throu | ||
| 1875 | Import of StarOffice Writer documents (*.sdw) | ||
| 1762 | import html as produced by Netscape Mozilla Composer |
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 | 309 |
| 1.0 | 126 |
| 1.2 | 4 |
| future | 77 |
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 55 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified):
157, 170, 305, 378, 534, 663, 678, 679, 763, 773, 780, 813, 818, 849, 879, 968, 981, 983, 1013, 1075, 1090, 1096, 1111, 1123, 1138, 1181, 1356, 1376, 1418, 1445, 1503, 1533, 1567, 1638, 1806, 1814, 1827, 1838, 1846, 1860, 1894, 1895, 1913, 1923, 1940, 1941, 1982, 1991, 2001, 2019, 2034, 2156, 2190, 2204, 2206,
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:
Commit: new plugins module and ImageMagick importer: Dom added an ImageMagick importer module. This means AbiWord can now import something like 60 different graphics formats (when the importer module and ImageMagick is available).
irc: F. J. Franklin asked how to get on the #abiword IRC channel and got the necessary help (judging by his presence there ;)
cvsup(1) added to cvs.abisource.com: Yours truly added cvsup support to cvs.abisource.com so developers can now make a local mirror of the CVS repository. Great for laptops and people who use a dial-up connection.
What is needed before 0.9.5-pre1?: Martin had a short list of items that needed to be fixed before the 0.9.5-pre1 release, and asked for others.