AbiWord Weekly News #102, (2002, week 30, released 2002.07.29)

Welcome to issue 102 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

The past week a lot of Bug Votes have been reclaimed by the developers, closing even a few very high profile Bugs. I must remind users to help QA the closed Bugs so their description will show up in the section of closed Bugs below. For now, you'll just have to take my word for it: the 100 QA pending (Resolved) Bugs have 485 Votes. Within the next month, the two highest ranking RFE Bugs (worth 1310 Votes) are likely to be closed as well. In addition to this, the GTK2 Unix changes has now been moved to the trunk of the development tree, and should also stabilize within a month or so. Come September/October, you should expect to see the first 1.9.x (pre-2.0) releases of AbiWord, according to the current planning on the development list.

This is the last issue of AbiWord Weekly News you will see from my hands. I have been editing AWN for 15 months now, producing 62 issues. It has been fun to follow the development of AbiWord during this time, and it's pretty clear that AbiWord is now only a few months away from gaining the necessary features that will make it a worthwile tool for many more people. I wish I had the energy to continue editing AWN till the day when I could write about the AbiWord 2.0 release. But editing AWN has become too much of a chore and not something I want to continue spending my spare time on. Unfortunately. It's been a fun ride, but I need to move on now. Thanks for your interest in the past, and in particular to the few who bothered to voice their appreciation for AWN, and more so to the even fewer who sent me money. I hope you will all be happy with the continued AWN in the hands of the new editor(s).

In this issue:

• CVS Stats
• Bug Update
• Latest Releases
• On the Mailing List
• Special Interest

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

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 a programmer to do this.

Bug Statistics

Bug Votes

These are the week's Top 20 Bugs in the categories problems and requests for enhancements. Influence next week's results by casting your own votes.

Verified Bugs

In the past week, the following Bugs have been verified as fixed. The listed Bugs have all been put in RESOLVED mode as either FIXED or WORKSFORME and have then been verified by the people listed below. Other causes of resolving a Bug (e.g. as INVALID) are not tracked since they usually do not represent a fixed problem.

To get your name in neon, help QA the Bugs. If you want your name rather than your email address to appear, drop me a line.

Latest Releases

Here are links to the latest official releases of AbiWord for various architectures and operating systems.

These are links to snapshot builds of AbiWord for a subset of the supported architectures/operating systems.

Note that the snapshot builds may not work (at all!), but are likely to include more features and have fewer bugs than (older) official releases. Use the official releases for "production systems" and the snapshot builds for testing and when you want to help with Bug triaging.

On the Mailing List

Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled at about 200-400 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:

1. commit head: new handling of justification finished: Tomas and Joaquín have been working on improved AbiWord performance this week. There are a few other threads related to performance and memory footprint improvements in the archive.

2. commit: fix reverse loading bug: Tomas fixed a problem that has caused development this week to be somewhat restricted due to developers having problems with loading documents.

3. Release of HEAD in a couple of months?: This thread discusses the release of the first pre-2.0 series AbiWord for user feedback, and lists the various features added since 1.0 was released. We can expect this to happen in October or so, with the 2.0 release hopefully following no later than April 2003.

4. Commit (HEAD): Merge the GTK2 branch into HEAD: Marc merged Dom's GTK2 work into the trunk of the CVS tree. This means that all developers will be using it from now on, and help sort out the remaining problems.

Special Interest --

From time to time, this section will contain essay-style text about various special interests of the AbiWord development.