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AbiWord Weekly News #79, (2001, week 3, released 2002.01.21)
Welcome to issue 79 of the AbiWord Weekly News, sponsored by Red Hat.
This week (as leaked in last issue) AbiWord 0.99.1 was tagged, and we're still in the release process. Hopefully there'll be a public announcement during next week. This week there's also been a lot of Bugs fixed and a few feature enhancements/completions.
Starting with this issue, AbiWord Weekly News is sponsored by Red Hat. This means that I'm allowed to write AWN during work hours, which should allow me to spend (more) time on Bug fixing and other AbiWord related work in my own time. Due to this sponsorship, I'm moving the release of AWN to Mondays, each issue covering the week before (Monday-Sunday).
The Bug count in the QA To Verify category is climbing. Please help us close them by downloading the 0.99.1 release and verify that the problems have been fixed. Some AbiWord 0.99.1 binaries are already available now at http://sourceforge.net/projects/abiword.
Also, if you want to help with the QA process during the 0.99.x cycle, you can find nightly builds for Windows here: http://www.darklogic.org/abiword/ and less frequent (but more stable builds) here: http://www.niksbiks.dk/Abi/. For Linux/GNOME you can find nightly builds here: http://pinohuis.dhs.org:8081/. Thanks!
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2002.01.12 - 2002.01.20 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| mpritchett | 73 | Win32 windows size patch (from Kenneth J. Davis), installer BiDi changes, fixed Bugs 1583, 2171, 2194, 2340, 2497. Updated Win32 installer. |
| dom | 46 | wv libole update, wv assertion added, import filter detection reordered, toolbar icon for play script, cut and paste patch (from Anthony Fok), MS Doc picture import improvement, fixed Bugs 609, 1319, 2213, 2380, 2381, 2577, 2579, 2590, 2592, 2595, 2604. Changed encoding for some locales, wv patches (from rvt@dds.nl), 1030 fix (from Bryce), aiksaurus configure fix, bump version number, plugin autogen change, WordPerfect importer update (from Marc). |
| fjfranklin | 29 | Some XDarwin tweaks, plugin and wv configure tweaks, RPM perl script update (from Gabriel Gerhardsson), big-endian dictionary for Portuguese, fixed Bug 2564, started on a HTML importer plugin, Brazilian ispell support and hash files. |
| tomas_f | 27 | Fixed Bugs 2476, 2487, (2570), 2571, 2585, 2589, 2606, 2608. Fixed order in language dialog, added UT_strcoll, Win32 default extension handling, toolbar BiDi tweaks, fix out of bounds write in dictionary code, fixed tabs on justified lines and a fribidi change. |
| hub | 24 | Cocoa work. WordPerfect importer improvement (from Marc). |
| phma | 20 | Polish update (from Piotr Banski), fix Slovak encoding, Slovak translation (from Martin Lacko), Welsh translation (from Rhoslyn Prys), Russian update (from Vladimir Stoos). |
| jskov | 13 | AWN #76-78. |
| aiken | 10 | Aiksaurus doc update, added some missing GTK-C bindings in aiksaurus and fixed spec file. Web site tweak. |
| rms | 6 | gl_ES update (from Ramon Flores) and it_IT update (from Marco Innocenti). |
| msevior | 3 | Fixed Bug 2600. |
| dchart | 2 | ChangeLogs updated. |
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 | 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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.12.24 105 ( -21%) 97 ( -17%) 385 ( +7%) 2002.01.07 92 ( -12%) 127 ( +30%) 398 ( +3%) 2002.01.14 100 ( +8%) 157 ( +23%) 398 ( +0%) 2002.01.21 97 ( -3%) 195 ( +24%) 395 ( +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 that can be cast in units of 1 to 30. But please only use votes in 5, 10, or 15-unit blocks (on a single Bug) and avoid casting votes on Bugs you have reported yourself.
From the sorted list of votes, we found the current Top 10 Bugs to be:
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1030 | Installing AbiWord messes up fonts in other applications (e.g. Netscape) | ||
| 376 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slurp | ||
| 1406 | xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg | ||
| 1402 | Can not use other than original type1 fonts | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey | ||
| 1046 | Some localized strings truncated in Windows version | ||
| 1781 | Toolbars do not remember position | ||
| 2598 | Abiword installs bogus fonts of dubious heritage | ||
| 1795 | 0.9.0 does not print images | ||
| 2317 | Added words to the custom.dic are not used to make suggestions |
And the Top 10 Requests For Enhancements to be:
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1276 | Table support | ||
| 1261 | Need to support footnotes and endnotes | ||
| 1016 | PDF output would be nice | ||
| 2321 | Maths/Equation Editing, as a plugin maybe? | ||
| 1929 | Hyphenation is missing in Abiword | ||
| 1950 | Wish for automatic Table of Contents | ||
| 1262 | [RFE] need to rewrite RTF import | ||
| 1875 | Import of StarOffice Writer documents (*.sdw) | ||
| 808 | Tables not imported from RTF | ||
| 2365 | AbiWord needs 'view codes' |
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 | 181 |
| 1.0 | 82 |
| 1.2 | 32 |
| future | 212 |
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 13 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed (FIXED/WORKSFORME) and verified):
609, 1153, 1410, 1583, 1903, 2007, 2324, 2425, 2535, 2579, 2592, 2595, 2604,
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:
Heads Up. Multi-threaded doc importer: Martin has been working on making a document render while it's still loading.
back compatibility post 1.0: Alan Horkan asked about the planned ability for AbiWord 1.0 to read documents saved by later versions of AbiWord. Dom pointed out that it's quite possible that the format used by later AbiWords will be more like that used by OpenOffice. Fortunately, AbiWord 1.0 has a plugin structure, so there's nothing preventing someone who needs AbiWord 1.0 to read AbiWord 1.2+ documents from writing support for it when it's needed.
Release 0.99.1 tagged: Dom tagged the 0.99.1 release. At time of writing there are prebuilts for Linux (GTK and GNOME) and MacOSX (as announced by Francis James Franklin). Note that we're still waiting for Windows prebuilts before officially announcing the release.
abiword script shouldn't add font when it already exists: Adrian Phillips posted a patch to change the way xset is being called. The thread veered into a discussion of the need for changing the X font list. Bottom line is that it's not something that will change this late before a release.
bugzilla configuration: Tomas is tired of seeing the 'popular vote' garbage message in BugZilla. Like the rest of us, I guess. The problem is a BugZilla bug which an update should fix - we're waiting for Sam to return. In the thread was also suggested a change of policy - that a submitter of a Bug should not be allowed to vote on it him/herself. We'll try to get that changed after the BugZilla update. Until then, please follow the revised voting policy described in the Bug Votes section above.