AbiWord Weekly News #124

AbiWord Weekly News #124, (2002, week 52, released 2002.12.29)

Welcome to this issue 124 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

Follow-ups:

This is the second week without a patch prize, and Project Blue Ant, which has no home page, btw, has gone into normal POW-dom, which means there will be no breasts in this issue.

This week in development

A new POW, referred to by its registered bug name, 4465, has been added. 4465 is a collection of spelling bugs compiled by Dom, which covers a wide variety of issues from the gui to the core, and even someone willing to do some Q&A could help. Jeremy has a series of announcements, specifically, the addition of libcurl into the AbiSource, the return of his Win32 builds and a new tool to make your updating life easier. Finally, most depressing of them all, Hub is forced to discontinue his Mac OS X porting, which, until now, has been impressive. Due to extenuating circumstances, the halt is indefinite.

Silliness of the Week

"But I know is not a stable release and the above problems will be solved before the stable release."
-- Stefano Zanelli on issues concerning a developers' release.
"Uh.....uh.....blame it on hub! (-:"
-- $20 trying to save his own butt, forgetting that the future stable of the developers' release will be the result of Dom's overlording/wrath....

This Issue

And remember, I give you an email address so you can talk to me, in case you're not on ither mailing list.

In this issue:

Discussion
Development
Bug Update
Release HackDown

Editor(s) of this issue: E. A. Zen

If you're interested in using AbiWord for the first time, receiving a more uptodate version, any particular version or special release, feel free to visit the new Latest Releases page.

DISCLAIMER: It should be generally noted that anything said before the "In this issue:" line is purely editorial.

Discussions

Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled at about 200-400 postings per week. This week, interesting topics on the developer list included:

libcurl peer module : A couple of nifty things from Jeremy. First, Win32 has been enabled to use libcurl, which will allow for all sorts of Internetty things...like downloading dictionaries...'n' stuff. Second, he has a nifty executable for you Win32 users to make getting the latest binary even easier; simply place Nightly Downloader in the same directory as your AbiWord.exe programme file and run it whenever you want. If a newer executable is not available, it won't bother downloading. This is just a simpler way to get to Jeremy's nightly builds, and I'm sure you Win32 users will appreciate it.
POW: 4465 : Dom has compiled a list of spelling related bugs and would like the numerous Abi-Users to help QA or fix. Actually, being on the dev list, maybe he was thinking the developers, too, but there's quite a bit the average Joe Bob can help clean up with as well. So, whether you know C or drink Hi-C, there maybe something in it for you. Also note, I've made this the latest and greatest POW.
New TWiki FAQ on Scripting : Randy Kramer, previously known as Cosmo, has added a scripting FAQ to Abi's Twiki. He also asks, in the one in a million chance that someone else knowledgeable actually looks at it, at the same time someone else does, please, keep the editing lock off.
We're important! : Some schmuck noticed that The Linux Weekly News acknowledged AbiWord's 1.0 Release as an important event worth adding to the Linux Timeline.
Merry Christmas: Additions to the TWiki : Remember what you did Christmas morning? Did you rush to open presents? Call relatives? Laugh at the Christians next door? Add more stuff to AbiWord's Twiki FAQ? Oh, didn't do that last one? Well, Cosmo, I mean, Randy, did. Catch up on his latest and greatest addiction, Twikoholism
AbiWord Weekly News #123 (2002, week 51) released : For some reason, the news redirection didn't update, so, I'm going to point this out here. Since at least three people asked about 123, including the new Porn Magistrate, I'm going to re-announce it. Now available here
localization of plugins? : Jeremy opens up for thought about locale for plugins. Frank wants to work out of XML and build as based on the needs of each system. Dom points out that Rodrigo Moya from the Gnumeric and Gnome-DB has already worked on a plugin localizing utility available in the GNOME cvs, and suggests learning from the work or possibly even collaboration.
Mac port halted : On a list of things you never want to hear from our BOFH, Hub, his only Mac OS X system, a PowerBook, has died of heart failure. No, wait, hardware failure. Due to the costs involved, Mac OS X work is pretty dead in the water. You wouldn't have 468 euros just lying around, would you?

Traffic on the user mailing list is sporadic at best. Often, a good topic comes up, but users tend to only respond to the original poster rather than the list (as well), which limits what I would add, as the only lone threads I post are announcements of great interest or importance. This week, interesting topics on the user list included:

centering a text on a page : David Bear learns we have no means of centering text vertically, save for the hitting of the enter key. RFE, anyone?
Two problems : Stefano Zanelli has a different problem with both 1.0.3 and the latest dev release. While Mark is quite helpful at returning the discussion to the list, he also walks through trying to localize the errors in the dev release. Mikey, having experienced a similar problem with the cvs, offers, "Adding /usr/local/lib to my /etc/ld.so.conf and re-running ldconfig resolved it for me."
Could not activate / load plugin : Jonathan Smith has issues getting his plugins to work with his 1.0.2 Abi on RH8. Mark suggests that the RPM's may have been meant for 1.0.3 and recommends upgrading. Johnathan learns that, in life according to Red Hat, 1.0.2 is newer than 1.0.3, as a result, Johnathan chooses not to push on. Your editor returns to the concept of The Red Hat Conspiracy.
import HTML : Alan G Isaac is having html/xhtml import troubles and asks for help. After answering some questions and some quick discussion, all we can do is have faith in Frank's magical work in that field. I was unable to reproduce the problem, but perhaps one of the AWN readers could pin the problem down and explain it. Meantime, Frank has asked for some CSS-related examples to try to flush out the bugs, and Hub summarized the situation best with, "Unless you use FJF *highly experimental* HTML importer plugin, HTML import is NOT a supported feature. And the XHTML importer we have is failing in several case because it is screwed up by design." Hub recommends exporting to XHTML for the time being, but warns, again, that it is faulty, and, "After that, I'd recommend going thru XSLT to convert to AbiWord XML."
LANG ? : Bernard Lambey is unable to place AbiWord's locality into french. Hub explains that the ISO syntax conflicts with libc and recommends changing the occurrence of the dash (-) to an underscore (_). He'd also like to blame POSIX conventions, despite that whole, seperate groups of the same standards corporation thing. Normally, the phrase "blame POSIX" enters a whole world of discussion (yelling) for me; however, the referred to issue is one I haven't looked at, so, I'm going to prevent pulling a Gilbert.

Development

CVS Stats

Track who put in how much and why. And, while you're at it, consider whether you'd like to keep your own cvs build as well. Tables...ooh....

CVS checkins 2002.12.22 - 2002.12.28
Who	Commits	In summary
jeremyd	341	libcurl 7.10.2 peer for use with ABI_OPT_CURL=1 & related update, Win32 frame size and position fix, mark odd case with assert and handle more gracefully (xp ut_vector).
msevior	35	left & top rulers recognize footnotes and increment if on same page, footnotes embedded in paragraphs, and bug ( 4173 )
hippietrail	11	fixed typos in other comments, added new comments where needed, rearranged string class in order: UT_String, UT_UTF8String, UT_UCS2String, UT_UCS4String & ended the life of UCS2 (which was outdated by the release of UCS4,)(all of which b0rked Barbarism work, leaving mpritchett to cleanup this issue for his tinderbox), "UT_UCS2_strlen enabled even with UCS2 strings disabled since MSWord importer uses it"
jskov	3	began work on the new POW with 1440 and something in reference to indenting/re-indenting the Unix Spelling dialogue.
uwog	2	"fix drawing errors in the view when working in 'Show formatting marks' mode"
mpritchett	1	fixed that whole UCS2 in Barbarisms issue mentioned in hippietrail's summary.
phma	1	Malay string update by Sharuzzaman Ahmat Raslan

*jordimas: system-related work is Windows unless stated otherwise.
*phearbear: system-related work is QNX unless stated otherwise.

Weekly Prize Patch

Dom, with the help of all those of you who donated to help keep AbiWord great, re-established the Weekly Prize Patch. Established at $45 pre-charges (read: the financial companies cut), the prize is awarded by the decision of Martin and Dom, both of whom must agree on the winner. Though neither Dom nor Martin may vote for themselves, they posses to "trumps" that allow them to vote for the other, therefore nullifying that other's vote. Most importantly, winning is entirely dependent on how lagered-up Martin and Dom are at the time in question.

And the award goes to:

No one!
Not one person received the prize between the 22nd and the 28th. /me thinks it should have been Frank....

POWs

The concept of a "Project Of the Week" is to single out tasks of major interest that outside developers might be interested in providing assistance to. Until a "best way" of listing POWs come to mind, they shall be listed in a short description. Any user interested is welcome to assist in tackling these POWs. If you know someone who's interested, you can link directly to a POW, in order, they're pow4 (at the top) through pow1 (at the bottom). Reminder to developers, I can't post them if you don't submit them. Additionally, feel free to announce if one of these is finished (in case you don't mention it on the list or in the cvs) Also, what a great way to get money from Dom!

Name: 4465
Description: This bug contains a compilation of numerous spelling-related bugs. Interested parties can do simple work, like Q&A to see what's still there, to more complex work, like dialogue fixin' and locale conversion If you have a current Abi and some time, you, too, can help
Advertisement: My spelring dilog isn nt ther
Recommended Outline: Whatever's easiest for you
Comments: All in all, there's something for everyone in there.
System: Any and every OS.
AbiVersion: Current (1.0.3, I would guess, dev and cvs releases may occur as well)
Challenge level: Variable
Current Heros: First week available

Name: Project Blue Ant.
Description: Perform component-specific tests, document procedural changes and open bugs as necessary.
Advertisement: Play the game and get a hero credit; more recognition than QA!
Recommended Outline: Email abiwordtesting@matthewcraig.com and include available system types, AbiVersions and previous testing experience. Receive testing instructions which will take one to two hours to complete.
Comments: No experience required. A good way to be introduced to AbiWord contribution efforts.
System: Any and every OS.
AbiVersion: 1.0.3 only (for now atleast)
Challenge level: *.... 1 star out of 5
Current Heros: "Some of the most active were Mikey Cooper, Tom Purl and Eric Blom."

^_^ More People find More Bugs ^_^ Back to normal POW status. However, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done, and we'd love to see you help! After the hyperbolizing this POW, interest has been dwindling, and there really is a lot left to get done. Personally, I think it's the holidays; however, you can't go by me, because I was going to add ASCII breasts to get more attention. On that subject, if any cute geekettes want to pose nekkid with an Abi the Ant tattoo, contact Mark Gilbert.
^_^ More People find More Bugs ^_^

Name: Style and/or Diction Plugins (bug 3281) (do either/or or both!)
Description: build a plugin to allow Abiword to check style and diction
Advertisement: me got no grammar fixer, help mes can't you?
Recommended Outline: Create a plugin for AbiWord that allows the checking of style and diction. The source code for the gnu style and diction tools is available here: http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html
As a prototype you might be able to hack something using the AbiCmd plugin to wrap the style and diction tools. The AikSaurus (Thesaurus) plugin should also be a helpful guide.
When you get the basics working you could try to get Abiword to display green squiggle underlines to mark errors, or otherwise work on a good user interface.
Comments: A great way to start playing with the AbiSource
System: Any OS will be fine.
Challenge level: ***.. 3 stars out of 5
Current Hero: The mastery of Kung Fu has yet to appear.

Name: Fix Windows printing boogs (bug 3239)
Description: Tackle some or more of the various bugs that cause issues in attempting to print under Windows
Advertisement: ????????????????????????????? (no, that's really the ad!)
Recommended Outline: You must become magical to know how to fix this.
Comments: "The problem is that printing on Windows is broken with several brand of printer drivers (see dependent bugs). It appears that with standard PostScript driver it does not happen. It appears also that version 0.9.6 had less problems than 1.0.1 so we might find out where the regression is bu diffing.
"Please, be sure to read all the bug reports. Even partial fix are accepted.
"Fixes must be done against STABLE tree and possibly ported to HEAD (the later can be done as a second step)."
This comes from Hub
Notice: This may already have been fixed with the libiconv upgrade, stay tuned!
System: Windows
Challenge level: ****. 4 stars out of 5
Current Hero: Not one MoFo yet has had the Huevos for this POW

Name: More Windows Maintainers
Description: Jordi could always use help
Advertisement: Help free people from the oppression of MSWord today!
Recommended Outline: You must become magical to know how to fix this.
Comments: Wouldn't be a bad idea to start with the printing bug...
System: Windows
Challenge level: ****. 4 stars out of 5
Current Hero: Jordi Mas

Bug Update

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. Ah, another release, another change of what bugs are on the "Most Wanted" list.

Top 20 Problems
ID	Votes	Milestone	Summary
3269	130	1.0.x	Crashing on printing
3525	90	---	font incorrectly printed and spaced
376	80	2.0	File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slu......
1406	61	1.0.x	xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg
4057	60	---	Thesaurus Shift+F7 keybindings shortcuts consistancey
428	57	2.0	Hitting return at the beginning of a paragraph changes fo......
3457	51	---	Crash under GNOME when printing
1747	42	2.0	background colour of text selection is always grey
4432	36	---	GTK2 Input Methods Unavailable
2362	30	1.0.x	AbiWord only prints across half of page
3845	30	---	Scroll wheel reversed when a Windows XP setting selected
3970	30	---	changing layouts can lead to showing other location than ......
4049	30	---	Crash on open file from floppy or network drive.
3778	29	---	Hanging indent setting ignores units
4216	29	---	Wrong line length, wont justify either...
2868	25	2.0	character widths are not calculated correctly for some fonts...
1394	17	2.0	on-screen landscape actually prints portrait in Win95
2299	15	1.0.x	Prints incorrect margins with split page.
2924	15	---	printing abw documents defaults to black pages

Top 20 Requests For Enhancement
ID	Votes	Milestone	Summary
1261	573	2.0	Need to support footnotes and endnotes
2183	248	Future	Fully Support OpenOffice's XML file format
1374	96	Future	[RFE] print odd and/or even pages only (for front & back ...
1950	88	Future	Wish for automatic Table of Contents
2565	72	Future	Add true MS Word .doc export capability
1144	67	Future	Improve KWord import/export filters
2490	41	2.0	Finish Cocoa Frontend
1929	36	Future	Hyphenation is missing in Abiword
515	35	Future	columns change should only affect selected text
2186	30	Future	The insert page break setting is lost for custom styles
2365	30	---	AbiWord needs 'view codes'
3668	28	---	Support for window tabs instead of separate windows
2219	27	Future	AUTONUM wanted in [ Insert/Field/Number ] menu
2296	25	Future	doc import: footnotes
2169	24	Future	Line numbering
1935	22	Future	inconsistecy re "units" selection in 3 different places
1762	20	2.0	import html
3233	20	2.0	New Language preference menu
3419	20	Future	[RFE] Add microspacing feature (tracking) for characters

This shouldn't be here.

Resolved Bugs

In the past week, the following Bugs have been verified as fixed. The listed Bugs have all been put in either CLOSED or RESOLVED mode as FIXED. Can you believe I said QA will return next week when it's been here (or not been here) for three weeks? Final reminder, owners are the squishers and qa are the flushers (in case there's some question).

One other note, and this will apply across the bug area when the idea of credit comes up,

Bugs Resolved This Week
Resolution	Number
Resolved	12
Verified	2
Closed	19

This Week's Bug Squishers:
Verified	Name
9	Dave "Behold my glory" Null
7	Sam "HIG-geldy piggeldy" TH
5	Dom "Fight Nice, Kids" Lachowicz
3	Hubert "Will Hack for PowerBook" Figuiere

3	Jordi "DeCaffeinated is for the Weak" Mas
2	jared
2	Martin "Laying on of Hands" Sevior
1	Frank "Never Calls Home" Franklin
1	Andrew "Hippie Trails, too you, until we hack again" Dunbar

Flushed Bugs

What you see here are either invalid bug reports or duplicates. So, basically, I'm showing everyone else how doofy you are sometimes. On average*, confirming duplication or non-validity takes four minutes and thirty-five seconds. That's the equivelant of 8LLOC of time for Dom. Any other questions why development isn't as fast as you want?

Non-Bugs Flushed this Week
Flushed	Number
Invalid	2
Duplicate	7
Won't Fix	3

This Week's Most Active Bug Flushers:
Verified	Name
7	Dave "Harder to Kill than Viagra Jokes on Leno" Null
5	No One "Pays Attention Anymore"

Caught Bugs

Bug spotters, beware, we're watching you!

Bugs Found this Week
Caught	Number
Unconfirmed	1
New	1
ReOpened	10

Release HackDown

This is an AbiWord Weekly News original concept: The Release Hackdown. In the table below, you can watch what bugs are being fixed in preparation for the very next release. Check the key at the bottom to understand formatting.

No pressure, guys, I'm sure only 2000 or so people will be watching to see what you do weekly. That breaks down to about 285 people daily and 12 people hourly, so, it's like being peeked at once every five minutes, literally. "Isn't that veird!?"

HackDown to 1.0.4
Bug ID	Description
~~1225~~	down arrow on last line must goto EOL
~~2174~~	Can't import Cocoa RTF
2223	cannot open psiWord files (re-opened)
~~2715~~	crash on zoom
~~3008~~	Cursor not initially in hyperlink dialog
~~3109~~	Smart Insert Hyperlink, check to see if selected text is a hyperlink
~~3171~~	rtf sets top and bottom margins to 0 (re-opened)
3239	[META] Windows printing bugs
3453	Crashes repeatably while attempting to edit header
3488	Weird crash when editing
~~3489~~	Crash when deregistering plugins
3561	Crash on embedded AbiWord in Evolution
3625	Multi Substitution waste memory
3632	editing the numbering style of a roman numeral list hangs/crashes
3645	Page setup has a problem with margins in millimeters
3678	[STABLE]Crash when editing this Word document
~~3686~~	XAbiword version for bundle not properly set.
3697	[crash] blank abiword document viewed as text (View Source)
3755	AbiWord crashes during import of this MS Word document
3766	Dvorak Keyboard
~~3840~~	Loading World.abw crashes AbiWord"
3858	export wrong content when choosing export to "Simplified Chinese GB_2312-80" encoded text
~~4039~~	Too Many Curly Brackets in Exported LaTeX (duplicate)
~~4046~~	The spellchecker has gone gonzo since upgrading from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3
4068	Crash when mouse leaves selected header
4070	[META] crash on load bugs
4093	Program Terminates on Open
4097	Save dialog file extension weirdness
4125	.doc file does not import correctly (BiDi issues).
4183	Save/reload puts spurious characters in simple file in 1.0.3
~~4212~~	Phantom Text appears after loading file with custom tab settings
4283	// comments expose lots of bugs
4304	crash when changing font of certain text (e.g. page numbers)
4363	[STABLE] Abi crashes after document open/close if text selected
4449	EV_EditBindingMap::removeBinding() leaks

removed from list:	3324
Strike-out bug numbers and greyed text are resolved. Bold bug numbers and bold text are assigned. Italicized bug numbers and italicized text are unconfirmed. Removed bugs are a sign you're being screwed.

By the way, 4449 is assigned...I'll mark it as such now.

Open Source, Open Books. Approximately once a month, don't hedge bets, I'll get this updated by asking (read: whining at) dom. In the meantime, whenever you want to see how much is in and where it gets diverted, just peek down here.

Current Balance: $1616.00
Interest earned: $7.00

Expenditures: $860
$400 to pay for Martin's Boston Gnome Summit Trip
$400 to buy Andrew Dunbar a new computer
$ 60 to misc./entertainment expenses at GNOME summit, GUAD3C, other, paid out of dom's pocket
$135 Patch Prize (those already successfully awarded)
- $ 45 Will Lachance
- $ 45 Marc Maurer
- $ 45 Ruud Vring

Unique contributors: 58*
paypal: 57
check : 3
cash : 1
*58: plusse 3 repeat offenders whom we love dearly

Contributions: $2723.00
Less paypal and other banking fees: $115.00

PLEASE! Help promote AbiWord development by donating money. The money go to a general AbiWord "fund", presently hosted by Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com).

In order to donate money, you must have a PayPal account. If you do not already have one, the links above will allow you to open one. Please consider putting cinamod@hotmail.com in the "Referral ID" field, which results in a one-time $5 donation from PayPal to AbiWord development if you verify your account. Note that only donations of $3 or more are of interest. Sorry, this is due to the fees imposed by credit card companies and PayPal.