AbiWord Weekly News #71, (2001, week 47, released 2001.11.27)
Welcome to issue 71 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
AbiWord 0.9.5 was released last week. We'll see 0.9.6 before too long though to fix a few bad bugs, but then we should be in feature freeze mode (bug-fixing only) until we reach 1.0 sometime early next year.
Now that 0.9.5 has been released, I'd like to ask people to read the release notes and download it. And (pretty please with sugar on top) do check if any of the (BugZilla) Bugs you may have filed in the past have been fixed (if so close them) or if there's new bugs (if so open new Bugs).
And if you are not too tired after that, please take a moment to look at the SUBMITTED and QA bugs and try to help them on their way through the system. The more help we get from users in the next month for bug triaging, the more bugs the developers will have time to fix. I know I've asked this many times, but I do wonder if people realize that even though AbiWord is a big project (a Word Processor is not something you hack together in an afternoon), there's only a dozen or so active developers. Any help we get with the administrative stuff potentially makes a big difference - and it's all to your advantage!
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2001.11.17 - 2001.11.23 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| dom | 45 | Started on OpenWriter importer/exporter plugin, fix bookmark/hyperlink export problem, fixed a number of bugs, new 16x16 icon for menus on GNOME, changed encoding of Russian hash file, Danish string update (?), Swedish update (from Per Larsson), fix zoom bug, xhtml patch, removed normal clean(?), changes to normal style, update default template, remove some debug output, silence GAL warning, make MS Doc importer use graphics architecture, and RTF importer build fix. |
| msevior | 20 | AbiGDKPixBuffer plugin, sort preferences alphabetically, added pref for disabling plugin loading, backend support for restarting page numbering on section breaks, and fix style undo bug. |
| fjfranklin | 18 | Type cleanup in font manager, wv config/build fixes, rewrote glib autoconf detection, Latin dictionary added, and dictionaries in big-endian format for a few languages. |
| aiken | 17 | Web updates for 0.9.5. |
| hub | 16 | Win32 icon fix (from Kenneth J. Davis), bump version to 0.9.5, RTF importer lets image importer handle images, added new (XP?) feature to RTF importer, some new toolbar icons (from Kenneth J. Davis), RTF honors picture size, other RTF importer improvements, and fix bug 2224. |
| tomas_f | 8 | Fix BiDi segv and some help texts updated. |
| jskov | 7 | AWN #70 and make squiggles work with undo. |
| phma | 3 | Lithuanian translation (by Gediminas Paulauskas), and Hungarian update (from Tamas Decsi). |
| aaronl | 1 | Silence GTK warning. |
| rms | 1 | pt-PT locale update. |
| mpritchett | 1 | Fix bug 2130. |
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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.11.06 155 ( -5%) 186 ( +0%) 331 ( -5%) 2001.11.13 164 ( +5%) 176 ( -5%) 329 ( +0%) 2001.11.20 176 ( +7%) 168 ( -4%) 327 ( +0%) 2001.11.27 172 ( -2%) 69 ( -58%) 350 ( +7%)
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 | ||
| 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 | ||
| 1243 | undo after a paste command causes crash |
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 | ||
| 1261 | Need to support footnotes | ||
| 1016 | PDF output would be nice | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey | ||
| 1487 | Implementation of font "encoding" | ||
| 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 | ||
| 808 | Tables not imported from RTF |
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 | 314 |
| 1.0 | 125 |
| 1.2 | 4 |
| future | 73 |
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:
ATTN: Dom announced the release of AbiWord 0.9.5 (Mean Blue Ant). Martin later posted David Chart's release notes.