AbiWord Weekly News #73, (2001, week 49, released 2001.12.11)
Welcome to issue 73 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
0.9.6.1 tagged in the tree, but as an internal milestone only. There was a slew of new plugins announced (sorry, I couldn't be bothered to link to them), and the usual squashing of bugs.
This week I've written a small rant on people's expectations of AbiWord - many need to stop and think about what AbiWord is, judging from some of the feedback we get. It would please me (and the other AbiWord developers, I'm told), if you took the time to read it - and possibly forwarded the link to other people using AbiWord. Thanks.
Finally, I've changed the expression used to find closed bugs in BugZilla: it now only includes bugs closed with resolutions FIXED or WORKSFORME. That should rid the list of closed duplicates and bugs that don't contain the necessary detail to be of use for the developers.
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2001.12.01 - 2001.12.07 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| hub | 145 | Cocoa work, added some RPM desktop data comments, and moved unix dialog helper to common code. |
| fjfranklin | 86 | autoconf/make tweaks for plugins, quote URLs before shelling them (from Dom), added Wikipedia plugin, added autoconf GNOME detection, fixed autoconf wv detection, and build system for babelfish plugin. |
| dom | 65 | lockStyles, fix pagesize client, fix 1279+1857+2233+2311++2314++2316+2330, support tr-TR, translation plugin tweaks, module configure version bumped, gr_control tweaks, bg-BG translation (from Iassen Pramatarov and Al Shopov), some RTF importer bugs, new GTK cut icon, plugin loading fixes, HTML exporter fix, .po files updated, and GDict history tweak. |
| tomas_f | 39 | BiDi changes, fix TTF printing crash, support Hebrew lists, makefile fix, MSWord importer BiDi fix, freebidi glib fixes, unicode direction markers, and detection of native BiDi support. |
| msevior | 36 | Fix on loading plugins on non-English locales, DnD from Galeon, underlining made thinner, DnD images from Nautilus, fixed page setup margins crasher (with Chris Chamberlain), translations for zn-CN (from Anothy Fok), plus list and style fixes. |
| phma | 27 | Chinese system files, Turkish strings and localization (from Alper), Chinese (from Anthony Fok), Finnish strings (from Ismo Makinen), Taiwanese strings (from Anthony Fok), and po2abi fixes. |
| jskov | 18 | Search/replace fixes, fix some debug routines, squiggles fix for footer/header, added text on user's expectations, fix AWN#71 typo, AWN#72 and fix some other squiggles bug. |
| hippietrail | 12 | Fixed tr-TR encoding, added more languages (translations missing), make babelfish plugin use UTF-8, and added translation plugin. |
| rms | 5 | RPM spec file fixes, plus pt-PT and it-IT updates. |
| mpritchett | 1 | Partial fix of HTML-with-lists pasting (bug 2069). |
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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.11.20 176 ( +7%) 168 ( -4%) 327 ( +0%) 2001.11.27 172 ( -2%) 69 ( -58%) 350 ( +7%) 2001.12.04 151 ( -12%) 112 ( +62%) 352 ( +0%) 2001.12.11 141 ( -6%) 141 ( +25%) 348 ( -1%)
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 | ||
| 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 | ||
| 1104 | AbiWord crashes when trying to load MS Word file | ||
| 1876 | some MS Word documents without password are treated as passw | ||
| 1402 | Can not use other than original type1 fonts | ||
| 1545 | Help only works for localizations en-US es-ES fr-FR | ||
| 1090 | Russian interface character set is still broken in Windows | ||
| 1046 | Some localized strings truncated in Windows version |
And the Top 10 Requests For Enhancements to be:
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1276 | Table support | ||
| 1261 | Need to support footnotes | ||
| 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 | ||
| 1487 | Implementation of font "encoding" | ||
| 1875 | Import of StarOffice Writer documents (*.sdw) | ||
| 1427 | "Lock" styles - disable all formatting commands except throu | ||
| 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 | 317 |
| 1.0 | 115 |
| 1.2 | 4 |
| future | 76 |
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 6 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed (FIXED/WORKSFORME) 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:
New zh-TW translations for AbiWord: ThizLinux Laboratory Ltd. has contributed translations for Traditional Chinese.
Turkish (tr-TR) L10N patches: We also got a Turkish translation from Alper this week.
commit: Drag'n Drop images from Galeon into AbiWord: Martin added DnD support of images from Galeon.
Plugins cause crash when LANG!=en_US: Andrew Dunbar found that plugins and non-US locale was a fatal mix.
Release: 0.9.6: Dom tagged the tree for 0.9.6. Unfortunately, it contains the plugin/locale breakage found by Andrew. So when it was fixed, Martin tagged the tree for 0.9.6.1. This release is an internal milestone only, however, so don't waste time looking for binaries.
Newbie potential developer, need help - how to store flag with document: Bryce Nesbitt asked for help getting started as a developer. Dom helped him along with a patch to the backend.